The Shape of a Pocket

following the Rhine. It was a Sunday and I was alone in the compartment and had been travelling for several hours. With me I had a cassette player and so I decided to listen to some music. Beethoven’s one-from-last piano sonata. A man stops in the corridor and peers into the compartment. He makes a sign with his hands to enquire if he can open the door. I slide the door open. Come in, I say. He puts a finger to his lips, sits down and slides the door shut. We listen. When the sonata ends, there’s only the noise of the train … He’s a man of about my age but better dressed and with an attaché case. From it he takes out a sheet of paper, writes some words on it and hands the paper to me. ‘Thank you,’ I read, ‘for allowing me to listen with you.’ I smile, nod and know that I should not speak. We sit there silently in the presence of the last movement of the sonata. This is how a presence makes itself felt.
    An hour later when a vendor came down the corridor selling coffee and sandwiches, my travelling companion pointed to what he wanted and I understood that he was dumb, that he could not speak.
    Excuse me, the telephone again. A listener wants to know: Who was the pianist?
    Piotr Anderszewski.
    That’s not true. Why do you lie?
    Because Piotr is a friend of mine. He plays marvellously, sometimes he plays with his sister, Dorothea, who is a violinist, he comes from Poland, he’s poor and he’s already twenty-six and soon – such is the competition on the concert circuit – soon it will be too late, for ever too late, for him to be recognised for the great pianist he is. So I lied to help him. Piotr. If I keep quiet, I can hear him playing the Diabelli Variations.
    On my way here to the radio station this evening I passed a photography shop. In their window they have a notice that says: IDENTITY PHOTOS WITH A TRUE LIKENESS – READY IN TEN MINUTES!
    To talk of a likeness is another way of talking of a presence. With photos the question of likeness is incidental. It’s merely a question of choosing the likeness you prefer. With a painted or drawn portrait likeness is fundamental; if it’s not there, there’s an absence, a gaping absence.
    The dog is now asking to be let in. The master gets up, opens the door and, instead of returning to bed, goes to his easel on which there is an unfinished painting.
    You can’t hunt for a likeness. It can escape even a Raphael… Strangely, you can tell whether a likeness is there or not when you’ve never set eyes on the model or seen any other image of the model. For example, in Raphael’s portrait of a woman known as La Mata, the dumb one, there is an astounding likeness.
You can hear it.
    By contrast, in Raphael’s double portrait of himself and a friend, painted in 1517, there’s no likeness present at all. This time it’s a silence without any life in it. Enough to compare this silence with the Fiancée beating her wings, for us to feel the gaping absence.
    There’s a village. A Kurdish mountain village in Eastern Anatolia. One night a wolf comes and kills many chickens and ravishes a lamb. Next morning everyone leaves the village, the men with rifles, the women with dogs and the children with sticks. It is not the first time this has happened and they know what to do. They are going to encircle the wolf. Slowly the circle closes, getting smaller, with the wolf in the middle. Finally it’s no larger than a small room. The dogs are growling. The men are holding their ropes and rifles and the end is very near. So what do they do? Wait! They slip a cord over the wolfs neck and attached to the cord is a bell! Then they disperse and let the wolf go free …
    You can’t set out to trap a likeness. It comes on its own or it doesn’t, a likeness. It moves in sideways.
    Are you saying a likeness can’t be bought or sold?
    No, it can’t.
    Bad news. Maybe you are lying again?
    This time there’s no need to lie.
    Wolves! Bells! Things which move in sideways! Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we now know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm – to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.
    * * *

    Animals are capable of feeling a presence. When a dog recognises a garment of his master by its smell – he perceives something similar to a likeness.
    You are obsessed with dogs! I thought we were