The Museum of Modern Love(35)

‘I’ve said it before,’ said Francesca to her husband. ‘Marina was Cleopatra in a past life. Or Hippolyta. Or élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. A painter would make sense.’

Dieter Lang sighed.

‘You must stop going,’ she said to him. ‘It doesn’t help her and it certainly doesn’t help you.’

‘But I need to see that she’s okay. I mean, we know she’s not. We know it’s hell.’

‘She will be fine. If there’s one thing I am sure of, it’s that.’ She knew Marina’s legs were swelling. Her ribs were sinking into her organs. But Marina would be fine. If Francesca wasn’t so entirely certain of Marina’s ability to succeed she might, over the years, have been more uncertain of her marriage. But there had never been any cause to be, as Francesca had surmised from the start. Marina was never going to fail. Dieter had made the right decision.

Francesca understood that Marina’s success required Dieter to be adviser, business liaison, friend, agent, counsel and accomplice in all things that promoted the artistic ambitions of Marina. This was not a malicious observation. It was simply true. Despite it being 2010, Francesca was surprised how often she had to defend the desire for success in a woman. If anything, it ought to be encouraged, Francesca thought. How tired she was, after all they had fought for, to find the ambitious woman still painted as the femme fatale, lacking in empathy, selfish, threatening—no matter how much she gave of herself to the world. It was ridiculous but it was still there.

Francesca had known Marina for several years before she had introduced her to Dieter. It had been Francesca who arranged the lunch where at last Dieter and Marina agreed on a working relationship. Of course it had to be. Why ever not? Dieter was the perfect agent for Marina. They both had the same ambitions, the same hunger for New York.

People asked Francesca how she felt about Marina. Wasn’t Marina tough? Ruthless? Yes, Francesca would say, and no. Marina’s the warmest person I have ever met. Women’s groups tried to claim Marina as a feminist but Marina denied it. She said she had made no overtly feminist pieces, though Francesca would dispute that. Surely Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful said a great deal about women and art.

The thing people seemed to overlook was that Marina had watched Yugoslavia turn into a religious bloodbath under Milosevic. Orthodox Christians, their crosses around their necks, killing Muslims and Catholics and atheists. Dead Bosnians and Croatians and Albanians on TV every night. Tortured women and girls. Rapes. Sex slaves. Mass graves. Marina knew what it did to people. She had lived with parents who each kept a loaded pistol beside the bed.

Marina had requested but been refused (once they understood what show she intended to stage) the Yugoslavian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Dieter had found her an airless basement ripe with summer heat and there she scrubbed cow bones fresh from the abattoir. Mounted on the walls of the cellar were photographs of her parents—Vojo and Danica—their images reflected in large copper water bowls. On one wall was a film of Marina dressed in a white lab coat, explaining about the wolf rat who eats all the other rats.

As visitors descended the stairs to the cellar, they were met by the sweet putrid smell of rotting meat. There was the artist in a bloodied white shift atop the pile of rotting bones, scrubbing away the blood and gore. This was a citizen’s response and a daughter’s response. An artist’s response. It was her own form of outrage and lament and possibly farewell to a country she had loved.

‘I am only interested in art which can change the ideology of society,’ Marina said at the ceremony to award her the Golden Lion.

Francesca understood some of that. She was German. It was enough simply to say that. She was German, and nothing could take away the things that statement had come to mean since Hitler. Francesca recalled the writer she’d seen interviewed on Oprah. Oprah had asked him what race he was. The young man had responded: ‘The human race.’

Marina did not actively befriend politicians, nor did she seek out the allegiance of billionaires. If such people came into her life, they interested her only if she felt a connection. She did not force anything to be something it was not. If she had ever been Hippolyta of the Amazons, or Freyja the Norse goddess, then in this life Marina had subdued her warring instincts. But not her wanting ones. She wanted fame. And she had sought it through long hard labour, by endurance and pain and heartbreak and love, over decades in which the only thing that kept her going was her commitment to herself not to let this life go unrecorded.

‘Didn’t you have an Anne Boleyn theory?’ Dieter asked her as he poured Grey Goose for them both, adding fresh lime and a splash of tonic. He was off the phone at last. An evening when they could eat dinner on the couch together and watch a DVD.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Francesca, remembering that she had once suspected Marina was the reincarnated second wife of Henry the Eighth. ‘I’d forgotten that one. But it does make sense.’

‘If I had been Anne Boleyn in a past life, then I’m not sure I’d be worried about death; I think I’d be worried about love,’ said Dieter, chewing on a piece of celery. ‘I think I’d worry about the cost . . . wild for to hold, though I seem tame, to condense Thomas Wyatt.’

Francesca took the glass he offered her. ‘To our Marina.’

And they both drank.

For twenty years Francesca had watched people subsumed by Marina’s greater force. They bathed in her radiance, her easy humour, her hospitality and magnetism.