'It must mean something.'
Sergei grabbed hold of the cord, stopped the lamp from swinging. 'Why must it? Why?'
'But it does, doesn't it?'
Then, just before Sergei shut off the light, Targov thought he caught a glimpse of a malignant grin.
'I want you to try and understand. We were victims of the apparatus. The men who ran it were evil. They hurt us both, and now we must hurt them back.'
Sergei yawned. 'You've already told me this.'
'But I promise you, it will work. I'll be punished for the terrible thing I did, and you'll have the pleasure of wielding the punishing instrument. Then we'll both be free, you from all your bitterness, I from all my guilt. A private matter, strictly between the two of us. As for the rest of the world, they will see something else.'
'Yes, of course, the famous emigre artist assassinated beside his sculpture in honor of refusnik Soviet Jews. Who else but the KGB would do such a wicked thing? They'll be hated by everyone. Ridiculed. Despised.'
'So you do understand.'
'Oh, I understand all right. And so what? Two days later no one'll give a shit. Aren't you ashamed, Aleksandr Nicholaivich, to come to me with such a deal? To ask me, of all people, to free you from your pain?'
Now he was confused. The meeting was not going well. He was the famous one, the strong one who'd come from halfway around the world with the startling, original, gorgeously conceived and balanced scheme. But things had gotten mixed up, he had misjudged his old friend's feelings, and now Sergei, nearly blind, had somehow gained the upper hand.
'Don't you wonder how it feels?'
'What?'
'To sit here now across from you.'
'I--'
'You know only how you feel, Sasha. Don't you wonder what it must feel like to be me?'
'Yes, of course,' Targov said. 'Please tell me. I would like to know.'
Sergei nodded. 'There's an old story by Komroff. A convict is released from prison after many years. As he leaves his guard asks him: 'How does it feel to be free?' The convict goes back into the world but he doesn't fit in. He becomes eccentric, turns his little room into a jail cell, and begins to collect odd little pieces of wire which he imprisons by twisting them, then stuffing them into a bottle. One day, when the bottle is filled, he decides to break it open. But the pieces of wire don't spring back into shape. Rather they remain twisted, a mass in the shape of their old prison, the bottle, from which, in a certain sense, you could say they were 'released.' '
It was difficult to arrange. Rokovsky had to plead. The director of Mishkenot Sha'ananim had received many odd demands from exalted guests, but a private plane, to fly out over the Negev so that Targov could view an 'earthwork' that no one on the staff had even heard about, a plane, moreover, that must actually be able to land on the sand beside the site-this one was quite incredible.
Still, Aleksandr Targov was a sculptor of international repute who had every right to view a piece of contemporary Israeli art no matter how obscure. So-okay. The director would do her best. 'Here in Israel we have a motto: Nothing is impossible!'
'While I'm away,' he told Rokovsky, 'take Irina to him. Leave them alone together, wait outside for her in the car. But check your watch -I want to know how much time she spends.'
It had to mean something. There'd have been no point in creating it if it didn't. Sergei had pointed him toward it, had wanted him to see it. But why? And what did it mean?
He had the pilot fly over it several times. The work was huge, its sides a good five hundred meters long. An enormous trapezoid enclosing a circle near its center-it looked exactly as it had in the drawings and photographs, except now there were some craters near the circle.
New embellishments or damage created by the wind? In the latter case, Targov knew, the piece would never last. But perhaps that was the point: It wasn't meant to last, was meant to erode and thereby express the relentless forces of time.
Targov knew about time-dimensional sculpture, but he did not respect it. For him the whole point of a sculpture was that it outlast its maker; art was an act of striving against the certainty of death.
As the pilot made a final pass Targov wondered if the piece might be a kind of signature. Two forms opposed: the sharply angled trapezoid and the smooth-sided circle inside. Sergei's mark, his way of saying: 'I lived and one day I was here.'
It was hot on the sand. He felt dizzy, nauseous. His eyeballs, shielded by dark glasses, felt as though they were being scorched. The pilot loaned him a hat, handed him a canteen of water, then waited in the plane while he trudged the four outer walls of the enormous thing. It took him nearly thirty minutes to make the march, a tortuous and monotonous inspection that yielded him no new ideas.
Then just as he was about to turn toward the center to inspect the inner circle, he heard a noise, looked up, and saw a lone military jet racing toward him out of the oscillating air. An extraordinary sight because the plane was flying extremely low, perhaps no more than a hundred feet above the sand.
The noise was deafening. He pressed his palms against his ears and flung himself into the deep trench that lined the earthwork's outer wall. He turned onto his back. The plane was a fighter and it was screaming at him. Suddenly it soared up. He watched it, saw it pass directly overhead, plunge down again, then fly off into the haze from which it sent back a terrifying boom.
Ears ringing, Targov rushed back to his own small waiting aircraft.
'To Jerusalem,' he yelled at the startled pilot. Then, when they flew over Sergei's earthwork, he looked down upon it a final time. He shook his head, furious with himself that having made such a perilous journey he still could not decipher it.
Irina wanted to fly back to California. That very night if Rokovsky could find her a seat.
'He's awful, Sasha. Twisted. A mean little man with nasty empty eyes and terrible stinking breath. To think how all these years I longed to see him. Now I never wish to see him again. Not ennobled either by his tragedy-in fact just the opposite, a deformed old zek. So maybe that's the lesson: that in the end we must wear the face of the monster, the one who lives inside.'
'You sound more disgusted than heartbroken, Irina.'
'I am disgusted. Now I want to go.'
'Won't you at least stay for my unveiling?'
She shook her head. 'I know you don't want me there. Better to wait for you at home. Our life together could be different now, Sasha. We could change it if we tried. You could give up your girls and I my bitterness. We could forgive each other. If we could do that then maybe some good will have come out of all our pain.'
There was something about that earthwork, he decided: something tormenting, something not right. It was the one thing about which Sergei had boasted, swinging the bare bulb, then grinning furtively, maliciously, as he'd suddenly switched off the light. He was concealing, or at least pretending to, and, like a damn fool, Targov thought, I was suckered in. I flew out there, thinking I'd discover its meaning at the site, then nearly got mowed down by that hotshot Israeli pilot doing bumpety-bumps in his ear-splitting jet.
But it did mean something. Why else would Sergei have designed it? And there was something strange about that too-digging those trenches, creating those walls must have cost a fortune. Who was the sponsor? Who had assigned him such a grand commission? And since when does a trinket carver such as Sergei Sokolov arrive out of the Soviet camps to find Israeli bulldozers ready to execute his 'conceptual art'?
It was a task for Rokovsky. Let Tola track the sponsor down. Meantime, now that Irina had left, he would watch Sokolov himself. His old friend, nearly blind, wouldn't even notice that he was there.
GIDEON
'You see, here's where they pried off the lock.'
David and Dr. Herman Blumenthal were standing just inside the garage behind Blumenthal's house on Abravanel. David nodded. He could see the chisel marks in the wooden door, could smell a musty odor too, the aroma of old papers, files packed loosely in cartons which, stacked together, filled nearly half the interior
