This time it was not a student but the master in person who spoke to me. Professor Maruhn was a friend of my charcoal-crusher. One day when I was standing motionless in Kuchen’s private studio, a dismal repair full of framed charcoal sketches, letting the black beard with the inimitable black stroke put me on paper. Professor Maruhn dropped in. A short, stocky man in his fifties, whose neat white smock might have suggested a surgeon if a dusty beret hadn’t identified him as an artist.
Maruhn, as I could see at a glance, was a lover of classical form. He thoroughly disapproved of my build and began to poke fun at Kuchen: couldn’t he be satisfied with the gypsy models who had earned him the nickname of Gypsy Cake? Must he try his hand at freaks? The gypsy period had sold well, there was that to be said for it; did the charcoal-crusher entertain hopes that a midget period would sell still better?
Smarting under his friend’s mockery, Professor Kuchen translated it into furious strokes of charcoal: of all his pictures of Oskar this was the blackest. It was all black except for a touch of murky dawn on the cheekbones, nose, forehead, and hands—Kuchen always made my hands enormous, swollen with gout, screaming with expression, and put them in the middle ground of his charcoal orgies. In this drawing, however, which was later admired at exhibitions, my eyes are blue, that is, the usual somber glow has given way to a distinctly light tone. Oskar attributes this anomaly to the influence of Maruhn, who was not a fanatic of coal-black expression but a classicist, alert to the Goethean clarity of my eyes. It can only have been Oskar’s eyes that persuaded this lover of classical harmony to select me as a fit model for sculpture, his sculpture.
Maruhn’s studio was light, dusty, and bare. It contained not a single piece of finished work. But everywhere there were skeletons for projected sculptures, so perfectly thought out that wire, iron, and bare lead tubing, even without modeling clay, gave promise of future harmony.
I posed in the nude for five hours a day, and he paid me two marks an hour. A chalk mark on the platform showed where my right foot was to take root. An imaginary vertical rising from the instep had to pass directly between my collarbones. The left leg was “free moving”. Illusory freedom. I was expected to bend the knee slightly and hold this leg slightly to one side, with an air of negligence, but I was not allowed to move it. It too was rooted in a chalk mark on the platform.
I spent several weeks posing for Maruhn. In all that time he was able to find no set pose for my arms comparable to that of the legs. He made me try everything: left arm drooping, right arm curved over my head; both arms folded over my chest or crossed under my hump; hands on hips; the possibilities were legion and the sculptor tried just about everything, first on me, then on the iron skeleton with the flexible lead joints.
When finally, after a month of strenuous effort, he decided to do me in clay, either with hands folded behind my head or as an armless torso, he was so exhausted from building and rebuilding his skeleton that he could do no more. He would pick up a handful of clay, sometimes he would even move forward to apply it, but then he would drop the dull, unformed clod back in the box. Then he would sit and stare at me and my skeleton, trembling as with fever: the skeleton was too perfect.
He sighed with resignation, said he had a headache, and without resentment toward Oskar gave up. He picked up the humpbacked skeleton, with fixed leg and free-moving leg, with tubular arms and upraised wire fingers joined behind iron neck, and put it in the corner with all his other prematurely finished skeletons. Gently, without mockery, aware of their own futility, the wooden bars, known also as butterflies, which were to have borne the weight of the clay, quivered in the spacious cage that was my hump.
After that we drank tea and chatted for an hour or so, which was counted as posing time. He spoke of former times when, vigorous and uninhibited as a young Michelangelo, he had spread whole wagonloads of clay on skeletons and completed innumerable sculptures, most of which had been destroyed during the war. I told him about Oskar’s activity as a stonecutter and engraver of inscriptions. We talked shop a while and then he took me to pose for his students.
If long hair is an indication of sex, six of Professor Maruhn’s ten pupils can be designated as girls. Four were homely and talented. Two were pretty, lively, and scatterbrained: real girls. It has never embarrassed me to pose in the nude. On the contrary, Oskar savored the astonishment of the two pretty, scatterbrained sculptresses when they viewed me on the platform for the first time and observed, not without a certain dismay, that Oskar, despite his hump, despite his small size, carried with him a sex organ which could, in a pinch, have borne comparison with just about anyone else’s.
The students’ trouble was rather different from the master’s. The framework was complete in two days; with the frenzy of genius, they would fling clay on the hastily and inexpertly fastened lead tubes, but apparently they hadn’t put enough wooden butterflies into my hump. For no sooner was the moist modeling clay in place, representing an Oskar who looked for all the world like a rugged mountain landscape, than this mountain-Oskar, or rather ten of them, would begin to sag. My head fell between my feet, the clay parted from the tubing, my hump drooped nearly to my knees, and I came to appreciate Maruhn, the master, whose skeletons were so perfect that there was no need to hide them beneath vile flesh.
The homely but gifted sculptresses wept when the clay Oskar parted from the skeleton Oskar. The pretty but scatterbrained sculptresses laughed as the perishable flesh fell symbolically from my bones. After several weeks, however, the class managed to turn out a few passable sculptures, first in clay, then in plaster and imitation marble. They were shown at the End of Term Exhibition and I had occasion to draw new comparisons between the homely but gifted sculptresses and the pretty but scatterbrained young ladies. While the homely but not untalented young ladies reproduced my head, limbs, and hump with the utmost care but, seized with a strange diffidence, either ignored my sex organ or stylized it ad absurdum, the pretty young ladies with the big blue eyes, with the shapely but awkward fingers, gave little heed to the articulations and proportions of my body, but reproduced my imposing genitals with the utmost precision. But while I am on this subject, I mustn’t forget the four male sculptors: they abstracted me; making use of flat, grooved boards, they slapped me into a cube. As for the object that the homely young ladies neglected and the pretty ones rendered with carnal verism, they, with their masculine intellects, saw it as two cubes of like size, surmounted by an elongated rectangular block: Priapus in terms of solid geometry.
Was it because of my blue eyes or because of the sun-bowl heaters with which the sculptors surrounded the nude Oskar: in any case, some young painters who had come to see the pretty young sculptresses discovered a picturesque charm either in the blue of my eyes or in my glowing, irradiated, lobster-red skin and carried me away to the upper floors where the painting classes were held.
At first the painters were too much under the influence of my blue eyes and saw the whole of me as blue. Oskar’s fresh complexion, his brown wavy hair, his fresh, pink mouth—all were submerged in macabre blues; here and there, serving only to intensify the putrefaction, a moribund green, a nauseous yellow crept in between the patches of blue flesh.
Oskar did not take on other colors until carnival week, when, in the course of festivities held in the basement of the Academy, he discovered Ulla and brought her to the painters to be their Muse.