A challenge in form and imagination

Dieuwertje Mertens, Kiefer’s hand | 350 pp. | Querido, €21.99

With her second book Kiefer’s hand Dieuwertje Mertens once again demonstrates her talent for storytelling and her imagination. Like a tree whose leaves unfold slowly, this novel, too, reveals its beauty slowly but surely.

‘Precisely because I know how many books are published, I felt that my book had to be distinctive enough – not just another run-of-the-mill story,’ he said Parole-critic Dieuwertje Mertens on the publication of her debut novel Mothers, saints. And her book, for which she was awarded a C.C.S. Cronestipendium for literary talent, was indeed anything but run-of-the-mill. In a sultry novel, Mertens brought together faith, cultural history and feminism, and also gave a voice to (an image of) the Virgin Mary.

These themes also feature in Mertens’ new novel, and the imagination reaches beyond the boundaries of life and death in a completely new and original way. ‘This book is a work of fiction,’ writes Dione, the ‘author’ of this story, who weaves her own life story together with that of her grandmother, Johanna Dewitt-Melief.

The first part of the book is about Dione, who, as a young art critic, meets the Jewish artist Abraham Kiefer. He has created an installation featuring an inverted Tree of Life at the Jewish Historical Museum, ‘which in Kabbalah is the symbol of the serifot, ’the ten divine powers through which the infinite God manifests Himself’, as Dione is told during the presentation. She becomes fascinated by the Tree of Life – which may well be the same tree as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – and, above all, by Kiefer.

Some time later, she is invited to report on Kiefer’s new installation in Paris, and when he offers her his hand, she cannot resist the temptation to go with him: ‘It is a large hand, a hand in which the world fits, and her hand—that, too, turns out to fit just fine.’ Although Dione is in a relationship with Homme, and goes on to have a daughter with him, Kiefer remains her lover for years. Leading a double life is nothing new to Dione; even as a child, she kept a secret diary. A neat diary in her desk drawer, which she knew her mother and sister would snoop through when she was away from home, and a secret diary hidden beneath that drawer, in which she wrote down all her true desires and thoughts. ‘Upper world, underworld. Outer world, inner world’.

When she opens her desk drawer as an adult, her grandmother’s funeral card falls out – a cold-hearted woman with whom she shares more than just physical similarities. For just as Dione is having an affair with the Jewish Abraham Kiefer, her grandmother Johanna had a long-standing relationship with a former SS officer, Rudolf Eyckman. Both women also have a child who may, or even probably, be fathered by someone other than the ‘official’ father.

In Part 2, ‘Voices, or: In Search of Johanna’, Dione sets out to find this grandmother, whom she has always disliked. ‘All family life is organised around the most damaged person within it,’ she quotes Freud as saying. In this fragmentary section, which is at times somewhat difficult to follow due to all the family members who suddenly make an appearance, Dione attempts to gain an understanding of her family background, Johanna’s background and life story, and, through this, of herself. Johanna, too, turns out to have been touched by Rudi’s hands: ‘Oh, and his hands. He had very beautiful hands, very refined.’

On seeing a little poem by Johanna in her autograph book, she thinks: ‘A graphologist would say of Johanna’s handwriting: too much space between the words: aloof, detached, isolated’. That is precisely the feeling the story has evoked up to that point: as a reader, one feels the relationship with the characters is somewhat cool and distant. But in the third part, in which the former lovers Johanna and Rudi – both now deceased – sit under a tree sharing their story with one another – Johanna knows nothing of Rudi’s past as an SS officer – the blood begins to flow in the book, both literally and figuratively.

Kiefer’s hand is a remarkable book, rich in themes: love, adultery, family relationships, motherhood, the life of a writer and an artist, imagination, life and death. Although the dialogue and shifts in perspective feel a little jarring here and there, Mertens treats her readers to delightful metaphors, such as words tumbling over one another ‘like an exuberant pack of beagles on the hunt’ or sagging buttocks that contain ‘all the sadness in the world’.

Kiefer’s hand It’s a bit like a Pointillist painting. ‘All those little dots side by side create an enchanting play of light,’ explains Johanna’s friend upon seeing a canvas by the painter Paul Signac. If you stand right up close to it, you see dots, but take a step back and the dots start to connect with one another, and the scene almost comes to life. Something similar happens towards the end of this novel. Only when the final full stop has been placed do you realise just how much Mertens has challenged himself in terms of form, expression and imagination.

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