The Fugitivities, стр. 25
He liked to tell the story of an important showing of his work at a reputable gallery in Paris in 1977. He was particularly proud of a mixed-media portrait, a mural of sorts, that he called Homage to Barbara Jordan, which depicted the congresswoman as a towering figure of justice in the act of indicting Nixon, who appeared as a grotesque, pale gnome in the corner, part of his face spray-painted over with graffiti. The crowd at the opening gave it rapturous attention and adulation, and he basked in this glow, right up to the moment when he noticed, or came to the end of a long failure to notice, that he was the only black person in the entire room. “If you ever find yourself doing something and you’re the only one there—you better check yourself,” he would warn Jonah in his sternest voice.
His father was, according to himself, black in the right place at the right time. But it still felt wrong, like a bad joke. Like he was getting the pretend version of what he had grasped at all his life. Yes, he had faked it when he had to, in order to rise; but now that he really wanted it, or rather wanted to be real in it, every vernissage he showed up to was full of the wrong people, even though they were the same people from the years before, the ones who were always thrilled to see him, wanted him to drink at their tables, pose for pictures with them, and never gave a damn about a thing he had made.
It could have led to despair, and for a brief and turbulent time, it seemed it would. But his father was able to convert these frustrations into a desire to get over, to get the most, and his social connections blossomed accordingly. He was even more successful once he made it obvious and plain to them that he was scheming, that he was a needy and somewhat fraudulent hustler taking advantage of their thirst for his “urban” sensibility. It only made him more glamorous, more real, and a stream of increasingly prestigious “minority” and “diversity” fellowships, residencies, and keys to chateaus were never more than a phone call away. His plot against the white art world quickly turned into something of a perpetual-motion machine, as he dragged his family with him from position to position, always in search of a place where he could maximize his quality of life at minimum cost. The family bounced around overseas from one art-world metropolis to the next: London, Berlin, Paris.
Berlin Jonah remembered as gray blocks, gray skies, and snow. Deep drifts under the linden trees on Hölderlinstraße. And the beautiful girl, very blonde and porcelain, whom he met sledding somewhere in a forest clearing, her image set to rest at the very back of the mind like a snow globe waiting to be shaken. If he closed his eyes, he could remember the sound of her name, but not the name itself. He might not have remembered her at all if she had not formed an early taste of some unspeakable gulf between desire and detachment, something bitter, a cool remoteness that frightened him. Those were strange days, when the TV spoke in a foreign tongue and rosy-cheeked boys like cutouts from Kinder chocolate commercials stopped cheerfully to interrogate him, touching his hair, laughing. The girl and her sky-colored eyes had questioned him too, that day in the woods, not with any overt hostility, but with distance, as if he had appeared like a comet, a sight from another world.
When his father announced that they were moving to Paris, the change meant nothing more to him than another, hopefully more temperate city. On the overnight train he dreamt that the girl was hidden in his father’s suitcase. He joined her there, and, in the darkness of the sealed luggage, she played with his hair. He told her to stop and slapped her. The trunk flew open, and she fled, vanishing into the silence and whiteness of German forests. He woke near dawn. Their carriage was flooded blue. The train clacked and screeched, gently rocking across the exchanges of a rail yard. Outside, the little balconies and the slate rooftops of Paris faced the pale sunlight.
They moved into an apartment on rue de Tocqueville, an unglamorous part of Paris near the rail yards, Jonah said, where switching tracks formed long radial chasms bisecting the Périphérique before sweeping out into the dreary suburbs to the north. The neighborhood shared the name of the little Square des Batignolles that stood beside the Pont-Cardinet station. If the weather was good, Jonah spent long afternoons in the park, where time was marked by the rumbling of the trains and the clean, cracking report of Pétanque players punctuating the gravel lots. A carousel turned, radiating a ragtime or an old song by Barbara, a sad woman who looked like a bird and sang like one too. Sometimes the race-car man had a set of wooden-pedaled soapboxes. If he was there, for five francs you could hurtle along into a halo of glory like Ayrton Senna, racing the commuter lines out of Saint-Lazare. That childhood experience of Paris, Jonah said, was impossible to evoke clearly. It had a shimmering, confectionary weightlessness; and yet it was also dense, a plenitude accumulated imperceptibly, like the leafy dust sagging in the green awning of the crêpe stand.
On the evening of the Phineas Newborn screening, he had come across an accident as it was unfolding on the boulevard Saint-Germain. A woman on a scooter had been struck by a small