More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man.
I was not born a cyclops. I was deprived of my left eye while commanding a platoon of Army Engineers,
We were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were fighting for our lives as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.
My mother and father had families bigger than those two of mine back in the Old World—and of course their relatives back there were blood relatives. They lost their blood relatives to a massacre by the Turkish Empire of about one million of its Armenian citizens, who were thought to be treacherous for two reasons: first because they were clever and educated, and second because so many of them had relatives on the other side of Turkey’s border with its enemy, the Russian Empire. It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.
The problems presented by such ambitious projects are purely industrial: how to kill that many big, resourceful animals cheaply and quickly, make sure that nobody gets away, and dispose of mountains of meat and bones afterwards. The Turks, in their pioneering effort, had neither the aptitude for really big business nor the specialized machinery required. The Germans would exhibit both par excellence only one quarter of a century later.
Father never saw or heard the actual killing. For him, the stillness of the village, of which he was the only inhabitant at nightfall, all covered with shit and piss, was his most terrible memory of the massacre.
“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”
“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said. “So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it’s a cannibal or billionaire!” “You still haven’t forgiven your father for being what he had to be,” she said. “That’s why you’re yelling now.”
white across a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. I was unconscious when I was taken prisoner, and was kept that way by morphine until I woke up in a German military hospital in a church across the border, in Germany. She was right: I had to endure no more pain in the war than a civilian experiences in a dentist’s chair. The wound healed so quickly that I was soon shipped off to a camp as just another unremarkable prisoner.
The formidable widow Berman told me the plot of The Underground, which is this: Three girls, one black, one Jewish and one Japanese, feel drawn together and separate from the rest of their classmates for reasons they can’t explain. They form a little club which they call, again for reasons they can’t explain, “The Underground.” But then it turns out that all three have a parent or grandparent who has survived some man-made catastrophe, and who, without meaning to, passed on to them the idea that the wicked were the living and that the good were dead. The black is descended from a survivor of
...more
“As for what’s inside the barn,” I tell them, “it’s the worthless secret of a silly old man, as the world will discover when I have gone to the big art auction in the sky.”
He knew the mission we were given after the German Air Force had been knocked out of the sky and there was no longer any need for the big-time camouflage jokes we played. This was the mission, which was like turning children loose in the workshop of Father Christmas: we were to evaluate and catalogue all captured works of art.
was his belief, as stated in his letter, that I had stolen masterpieces which should have been returned to their rightful owners in Europe. Fearing lawsuits brought by those rightful owners, he said, I had locked them up in the barn. Wrong.
But our travels behind the lines did bring us into contact with persons in desperate circumstances who had art to sell. We got some remarkable bargains.
And then one day I and my platoon of artists were ordered into combat, to contain, if we could, the last big German breakthrough of World War Two.
concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money. I was not saddened about this. I was in fact much relieved!
Best of all, I could pick up the check at the end of the evening, thanks to the money I was making in the stock market, subsistence payments I was receiving from the government while going to the university, and a lifetime pension from a grateful nation for my having given one eye in defense of Liberty.
To the real painters I seemed a bottomless pit of money. I was good not only for the cost of drinks, but for rent, for a down payment on a car, for a girlfriend’s abortion, for a wife’s abortion. You name it. However much money they needed for no matter what, they could get it from Diamond Rabo Karabekian. • • • So I bought those friends. My pit of money wasn’t really bottomless. By the end of every month they had taken me for everything I had. But then the pit, a small one, would fill up again.
have now returned to this typewriter from the vicinity of the swimming pool, where I asked Celeste and her friends in and around that public teenage athletic facility, if they knew who Bluebeard was. I meant to mention Bluebeard in this book. I wanted to know if I had to explain, for the sake of young readers, who Bluebeard was.
They did not. So much for achieving immortality via the arts and letters. So: Bluebeard is a fictitious character in a very old children’s tale, possibly based loosely on a murderous nobleman of long ago. In the story, he has married many times. He marries for the umpteenth time, and brings his latest child bride back to his castle. He tells her that she can go into any room but one, whose door he shows her. Bluebeard is either a poor psychologist or a great one, since all his new wife can think about is what might be behind the door. So she takes a look when she thinks he isn’t home, but he
...more
So—of all the people who know about my locked potato barn, the one who finds the mystery most intolerable is surely Circe Berman. She is after me all the time to tell her where the six keys are, and I tell her again that they are buried in a golden casket at the foot of Mount Ararat.
“Look: think about something else, anything else. I am Bluebeard, and my studio is my forbidden chamber as far as you’re concerned.”
The Bluebeard story notwithstanding, there are no bodies in my barn. The first of my two wives, who was and is Dorothy, remarried soon after our divorce, remarried happily, from all accounts. Dorothy is now a widow in a beachfront condominium in Sarasota, Florida. Her second husband was what we both thought I might become right after the war: a capable and personable insurance man. We each have a beach. My second wife, dear Edith, is buried in Green River Cemetery out here, where I expect to be buried, too—only a few yards, in fact, from the graves of Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen.
The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.
My mother was shrewd about the United States, as my father was not. She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.
In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee!
“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”
I happened to watch the sermon of a television evangelist the other night, and he said Satan was making a four-pronged attack on the American family with communism, drugs, rock and roll, and books by Satan’s sister, who was Polly Madison.
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.
It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends and relatives to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States.
How good were those pictures of mine which Dan Gregory looked at so briefly before he shoved Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age—a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory.
A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.
moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
Even if Marilee hadn’t seen those pictures of me, I would have been easy to spot, since I was the darkest passenger by far on any of the Pullman cars. Any passenger much darker than me in those days would have been excluded by custom from Pullman cars—and almost all hotels and theaters and restaurants.
“Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth,” she said, “or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?” “I think I do,” I said. “Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio,” she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, “that doesn’t mean there’s a symphony orchestra inside.” “What’s that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?” I said. “Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something
...more
which had very different ideas about what they should say and do.”
But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.
About a year later, I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were, and he said, “Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do.”
“But don’t you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?” he said. So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil. “And who renders the final decision on that?” he said. “God?” I said. “I mean here on Earth,” he said. “I don’t know,” I said. “Painters—and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians,” he said. “They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong
...more
Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.
That finally became what was going to happen next: she would drop dead in Turtle Bay Chemists, a drugstore two blocks away. But here was the thing: the undertaker discovered that she wasn’t just a woman, and she wasn’t just a man, either. She was somewhat both. She was a hermaphrodite.
I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again. Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique.
I think the cook and my first wife were right: I have always been leery of women—possibly because, as Circe Berman suggested at breakfast this morning, I considered my mother faithless, since she had up and died on me.
She was cool and stiff with me, too, I have to say, possibly answering formality with formality. There was probably this factor, too: she wanted to make it clear to me, to Fred, to Gregory, to the hermaphrodite cook, to everybody, that she had not caused me to be brought all the way from the West Coast for purposes of hanky-panky.
I have had quite a few friends commit suicide, but was never able to see the dramatic necessity for it that Marilee saw in Ibsen’s play. That I can’t see that necessity is probably yet another mark of my shallowness as a participant in a life of serious art.
Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not, and I believed back then that sperm, if not ejaculated, was reprocessed by healthy males into substances which made them athletic, merry, brave and creative. Dan Gregory believed this, too, and so did my father, and so did the United States Army and the Boy Scouts of America and Ernest Hemingway. So I cultivated erotic fantasies about making love to Marilee, and behaved as though we were courting sometimes, but only in order to generate more sperm which could be converted into the beneficial chemicals.
Never before had visitors bid me farewell so ardently! Usually they can hardly think of anything to say. And they called something to me from the driveway, grinning affectionately and shaking their heads. So I asked the man from the State Department what they had said, and he translated: “No more war, no more war.”
Back to the Great Depression! To make a long story short: Germany invaded Austria and then Czechoslovakia and then Poland and then France, and I was a pipsqueak casualty in faraway New York City. Coulomb Frères et Cie was out of business, so I lost my job at the agency—not that long after my father’s Moslem obsequies. So I joined what was still a peacetime United States Army, and scored high on their classification test.
But the Army adopted me as Rabo Karabekian—as I was soon to discover, for this reason: Major General Daniel Whitehall, then the commander of the combat troops of the Corps of Engineers, wanted an oil painting of himself in full uniform, and believed that somebody with a foreign-sounding name could do the best job.
Another painting of mine which just might outlive the “Mona Lisa,” for better or for worse, is the gigantic son of a bitch out in the potato barn.
