Monument Maker, page 30
Where is the girl with the dark-blue bikini and the perfect young ass? Ah, there she is, beneath the tree, adjusting her bikini. My Flower dangles her legs in the water and ties her hair up in a bun. Now she floats on her back as a maroon-coloured car with the windows down passes on the bridge. A little kid in white briefs holds his nose as he jumps in. Now the dog-training guy has his son in the water with armbands on. And now my Flower has floated out of sight.
Christ is everywhere, and always, and his presence in the sacrament is an underlining, and a remembrance, of this.
A cheer goes up. Time for that first drink.
And now it is raining, and I am alone, and far from everything I have loved. What faith do I have left? In what was given, and what was taken away. And for what.
This.
Is.
Monument Maker.
Ook.
9. FINAL CHURCH OF FÜHRERBUNKER
Juliette Swedenborg stands in the garden of a two-storey semi-detached villa in a northern suburb of Paris. She is holding up an old-fashioned camera. In front of her stands a young Pierre Melville, his arms resting on a brand-new red-and-white motorcycle. In his hand he is holding a flower.
Do you know how flowers grow? Miss Swedenborg asks him. She gestures towards the snowdrop and has him look inside. Inside is for the bees, she says. All those secret patterns. They’re not for you and me. Pierre holds the bud up to his eye. Inside it looks like a spacecraft; sleek, streamlined. Don’t tell me what it looks like, Miss Swedenborg insists, raising the camera. It is a melody more than a word, she says. Don’t describe it to me.
Miss Swedenborg was a legendary figure in Parisian art circles of the 1930s and 40s. She had been a war artist during the Second World War. Commissioned to paint coastal defences, aircraft manoeuvres and warships, she instead delivered a series of paintings that were indistinguishable in their emptiness, blank vistas of sea and sky, the one confused with the other. These were true war paintings, she insisted, regardless of their lack of anything that might signpost the circumstances of their creation. While many lesser works were exhibited at the time, works that could have been interpreted as giving away crucial data to the enemy had they been invited to see them, Miss Swedenborg’s paintings were hidden away, taken from her and secreted in a bunker at the Ministry of Defence. She never painted again, after the war, and it wasn’t until 1961, as a result of a committee that was formed in Paris and that drew from some of the greatest artists of the day, that the paintings were returned to her. Their first showing took place at a private gallery in Paris in the summer of 1964. Pierre had attended the exhibition as a young man and had been struck by their broiling emptiness. Using oil on watercolour, Miss Swedenborg had painted the union of the sea and the sky as a chasm, a trapdoor into another world. Look closely at a painting like La Ciotat, August 7th, 1940 or Île du Levant, March 8th, 1939 and at the point where the sea meets the sky, or vice versa, it is possible to make out a system of subtle erasures, created, it would seem, by the edge of a blade, that appeared to be the source of the light that flooded the canvas. No sun was ever described; no heavenly bodies appeared in the sky. Yet the paintings were illuminated.
Their first meeting had been awkward, but Pierre never forgot it. Miss Swedenborg had presented a talk to the local school in the spring of ’62 about her wartime experiences and her career in painting and subsequent work in the theatre. Pierre had been singled out by the headmaster for a one-on-one conversation afterwards due to his success in recent examinations and his displaying a burgeoning interest in the arts. Miss Swedenborg appeared uninterested. She sat on the edge of the stage in the assembly room and yawned into an intricately embroidered handkerchief that featured the letters of the alphabet. Pierre had compiled a series of questions and he held them in front of him on a clipboard, every inch the keen young reporter. This is awful, he thought to himself. This adult is completely bored by me. Miss Swedenborg took a small lipstick holder from her handbag. Her lips were flaked and hot pink as she applied another crumbling layer of colour. There was something animal and forbidden about it as well as a bit rotten.
How do you become an artist? Pierre asked her. She put the lipstick back in her bag and rolled her lips together. Pierre noticed a large mole with hair growing out of it on her upper lip. It caught his eye in an attractively repulsive way. There is nothing to become, Miss Swedenborg responded, snapping her hand-mirror shut. She smelled of mint and of toilet spray and of old paper doilies, if they even have a smell, which Pierre believed they did. In that case, how does one start? he asked her. He was nervous and as usual in these kinds of situations his speech was becoming increasingly convoluted. She stared back at him like an emaciated bird of prey and he imagined a little pellet with his tiny bones inside dropping from her mouth with a soft thud. I will tell you a story, she said, and she repositioned herself on the edge of the stage. That way we can dispense with the questions altogether. Pierre nodded and meekly put his clipboard to one side. You ask about art, she said. You are searching for a calling, it seems.
A few years before the outbreak of the war I set out on a walking tour of Scotland, she began. I was caught in much the same conundrum. I pictured my calling as being somewhere out there, wrapped up in experience, secreted in a future that could be unlocked with a precise series of actions, a combination of bravery, irresponsibility and a willingness to get lost, perhaps, though I was never able to reduce it to a pithy formula like that. This is a quick sketch for your benefit, you understand, she said. She searched inside her bag and took out a clove cigarette and lit it, leaning back on the stage with one arm, the other holding her cigarette at an exaggerated angle. Pierre thrilled to this illicit adult activity in the gym hall. I prescribed myself a walking cure, she continued, shaking out the match. I carried all that I needed on my back. I had a small one-woman tent, a sleeping bag and a rucksack.
The summer was unseasonably warm, and I spent many nights sleeping in the open air by the sides of lochs and in the deep grass that grows up beside rivers. Of course I was scared, on occasion, but at that time of year it never truly gets dark in Scotland and so even at my most isolated I would look up at the sky and see that deep royal blue and know that there was nothing really to worry about, certainly not in those days, not in those times, a young woman in the 1930s. I would look up at the night sky and I would tell myself, it’s only a bruise, you can handle it. I kept feeling like I was on the edge of some kind of epiphany. That just up ahead there was a moment that had lain in wait for me.
Everything became exalted; everything seemed lit up, self-possessed, glowing. She traced a quick figure eight in smoke above her head. Every chance encounter, every sunlit morning or drizzly afternoon had its own perfect rhythm, she continued. I met a man, a boy, really. We were both staying at a hostel near Glen Affric. He was a black boy, which was a shock. I grew up in a small village. I had never seen a black person until then. I saw him at breakfast, sitting on his own at a table, reading and taking notes. I kept grabbing a look at him and then looking away. The next day he was still there.
Something made me stay on. I spent the day hillwalking and dozing in fields of bracken just thinking about him, imagining what he was doing there, then I checked back into the hostel. Sure enough, at breakfast, there he was again. He wasn’t going anywhere either. I began to get the feeling that we were both hanging on for each other, that this was a meeting that had to take place, one of those fixed moments in time that I had gone out looking for. In the evening someone had organised one of those godawful folk sessions in a bothy along the way. I saw a handwritten poster for it and decided to check it out. There was nothing else to do for miles around. Besides, I thought he might be there, being a tourist and all.
I made my way in the dark-blue night to this tiny stone building in the middle of nowhere with a rusted corrugated roof and eyeless windows and the wind blowing through it. I could see a light inside, a little candle, guttering in the breeze. I opened the door and walked in. There was no one there but the black boy, seated on a log, with a guitar on his lap. Have you come for the music? he asked me. I told him I had but that I couldn’t play anything myself. That’s okay, he said. I know all the songs.
That was the exact phrase he used, Miss Swedenborg insisted, that he knew all the songs. He had a bottle of whisky with him, she recalled. We passed it back and forth and he sang these songs, these beautiful songs, songs about swans that became people and ships that sailed through forests and girls who dressed as boys in order to join the British army on the banks of the Nile. He played the guitar with his fingers and at one point he stopped and held his hand out to me. Feel that, he said. I’ve almost worn my fingerprints away. We talked into the night. He told me he worked at the hostel, seasonal work. He was sending his wages back to Glasgow, where he had a wife and two kids. But there was another reason he was there. That’s when he told me about Glen Affric. It’s Glen Africa, he told me. That’s the real name. He told me a story about how there had been a revolt of slaves. They had been imprisoned by Romans who had brought them to England from the valley of the Blue Nile. But they had escaped and had made for Scotland, eventually settling in Glen Affric, which reminded them of the highlands of Ethiopia. They remained there for centuries. In fact, they’re still here, he told me. Of course, I never asked his name, Miss Swedenborg admitted. Quite strange, really. Pierre nodded obediently. But he insisted that the Africans were still hiding out in Glen Affric, she said, still thriving, in fact. He had made contact, he claimed, that was the real reason he worked there. He was their only connection to the outside world. I asked him why no one else had ever seen them, why there had been no reports of their existence. Were they in hiding? They’re not in hiding, he told me. They have become invisible.
The next morning I waited for my boy at breakfast, but he didn’t appear. I asked someone working in the kitchen about him and they said he had checked out early that morning, that he didn’t work there at all, in fact they had never seen him before. That day I set off on my own and hiked into Glen Affric. It was true, what he said, Miss Swedenborg nodded. They have all become invisible.
Just then the headmaster poked his head through the door. Their time was up. Miss Swedenborg stubbed her cigarette out on the heel of her shoe, threw her bag over her shoulder and walked off without even saying goodbye. Pierre watched through the door as she made a big deal about embracing the headmaster and thanking him for a wonderful afternoon before disappearing in a haze of perfume.
Miss Swedenborg’s war paintings have been compared to Constable’s seascapes and to Turner’s later work. Some argue that her paintings are essentially unpainted, that they are simply primed, and so endlessly receptive, precognitive, even. A painting like Le Dramont by Night, it has been argued, anticipates, daily, again and again, until the end of time, the coming night that will, hope against hope, blanket the little seaside town and engulf its sleeping inhabitants once more.
Pierre stood a few inches from the canvas and stared hard. At this point he knew little about art. As with literature, his taste lay with the outliers. He squinted at the canvas, a thick, otherworldly accumulation of blue-greens and blacks, and fancied it squinted back at him. It reminded him more of Rembrandt, a Rembrandt painting of an eye, but an eye that was half closed and not half open and made of glass, maybe. Other paintings added to the feel of a prepared canvas, a painting in a state of anticipation. Seascapes like From Marseilles Harbour, September 13th, 1940 resembled more a single drop of paint, a tiny pink flame afloat in clear water. First stroke, first light; a perpetual sunrise. Then there were the systematic erasures. What to make of an art that destroys itself in its creation? Except that it must, essentially, be autobiographical.
In keeping with the quality of reception that Miss Swedenborg’s war paintings seem to have, the erasures have been described as passages, as tunnels from the past into the future. Could this have been one of the reasons for the military’s refusal to have them shown during the war, to secrete them in a vault in the Ministry of Defence? There is no such thing as an “erasure,” Miss Swedenborg insisted in the notes to her catalogue, though by this point she was said to be suffering from the early stages of dementia, her own mind riddled with inexplicable voids and hollows. An erasure, Miss Swedenborg insisted, removes nothing. In fact, it accumulates. By the act of erasure, you are building upon what was there before. There is no way to subtract, she wrote. There is no route backwards. Nothing is undone.
Pierre stared at the indeterminate skylines, at the scabbed and picked-over horizons, and thought of entry points and exit wounds. Is it possible to paint anything that isn’t a self-portrait? He caught his own reflection in the glass of a painting purporting to show a military fleet lighting out. It seemed to consist of nothing but shadows and deep gouges yet there was something piercingly sad about it, a purposeless quality of disarray, perhaps, a vision of pointlessness. Pierre lingered over the painting for some time. These are no modern warships, he realised with a start. These ships are ancient. He saw the erasures, the voids and pockmarks that dotted the canvas as a form of rigging, a complex of masts and ropes that rose up and out of the painting to enable it to take sail. And he saw in it his own lighting out, the blank that was yet to come, and all of the forgetting it would take to get there.
In the wake of the exhibiting of Miss Swedenborg’s war paintings, Pierre made a decision. He wouldn’t go on to college or university. Instead he would set out himself, just as Miss Swedenborg had done. He used the last of his savings from a part-time job to purchase a new motorcycle, an expensive red-and-white Honda. Then he made an appointment to see Miss Swedenborg one more time.
Of course, she had no memory of him. I interviewed you when you came to give a talk at my school, Pierre told her. She smiled and said, that’s nice, the way you would compliment a small child on a rudimentary drawing. I would like to take your picture, young man, she said, and she held the old-fashioned camera up in front of her. Pierre posed behind his bike, a delicate flower in his hand. Miss Swedenborg revealed to him the secret nature of flowers and then led him indoors for tea.
She made him sandwiches, though quite unlike any sandwiches he had had before. These are Danish sandwiches, she claimed, buttering a single slice of bread, spreading salmon pâté on it and then crumbling salted crackers on top. This is how they do it in Denmark.
The crowded living room smelled of mints and of beef and of old potpourri and of Calor gas. Despite there being a roaring fire in the hearth, Miss Swedenborg insisted on lighting a small gas heater and rolling it into place next to it. Shouldn’t you be careful not to put that too close to the fire?
Pierre asked her. Young man, she said, I lived through the war. I’m not afraid of gas. Now, she said, about that skelf. About what skelf? Pierre asked her. The skelf you were kind enough to call about.
It’s in here, she said, and she held out her index finger. I suppose a needle would be best. You can find one in those drawers over there. Pierre got up and rustled through a set of green-painted drawers that were stuffed full of string and wool and small pieces of shredded paper. Does a mouse live in here? he joked. Yes, Miss Swedenborg said, yes, I don’t doubt it, and she raised herself from her seat and stood over him so as best to monitor Pierre’s retrieval of the needle. A mouse will eat you out of house and home, she said.
Miss Swedenborg gave Pierre her hand. Prick the skin, she said, dredge it out. It feels good to have someone pierce your skin, don’t you think? It’s never as satisfying to do it to yourself. Pierre removed the skelf, which was actually a piece of strange metal, which caused a trickle of blood to run into Miss Swedenborg’s palm. I saw your exhibition at the art gallery, Pierre said, hoping to steer the conversation in the direction of something relevant. He was starting to despair of coming here in the first place. I could’ve painted Hitler’s bunker, she replied.
I could have but I didn’t, she said. I snuck in after the war. It was all sealed up, top-secret, hidden treasure. She resumed her place in front of the fire. The Führerbunker, she said, the dream of infiltrators worldwide. There it was. I scaled the fence, prised open a door, took my paints and a foldaway stool and a searchlight and descended into the depths. It had been vandalised. There was extensive flooding. Great desks were upturned; who knows, even the desk that Hitler laid his elbows on and hung his head in despair may have floated past me without concern. I had entered via the stairs to the Foreign Office garden, so I had some ways to go. The central dining passage was like an ark, a cavernous, echoing ark. I thought of everyone drinking wine and gorging on pointlessness in the last days of the war. I descended the stairs to the lower level. All the while I was aware of a presence. Someone was in there, I knew it. I did a quick recce of Goebbels’s quarters. There isn’t much to tell, an iron bed frame, a filing cabinet, piles of rubble here and there. Not as exciting as you’d think. I crossed the hallway and I held my breath as I prepared to take in Hitler’s bedroom and across the way, Eva Braun’s quarters. As I passed through Hitler’s study, which had been completely gutted, I became aware of a scraping noise. I’ll never forget it. It was like the sound of the first man who invented fire, going at it again and again, chit, chit, chit, chit, like a flint that just wouldn’t catch. Oh my, I said, we’ve gone backwards in time. Hitler has sent us all to the Stone Age. I opened the door to his bedroom, which still had a lovely ornate handle on it, and there, in the pitch dark, a figure was sitting on a small stool. Someone had beaten me to it. The sound that I had heard was charcoal. This man was drawing a picture of Hitler’s bedroom, in the dark, with a piece of charcoal. We looked at each other for a second, unsure of how to react. Neither of us spoke. I shone my flashlight at him, but he just put his hand up in front of his face. Eventually I simply nodded and retreated. The game was up. He’d beaten me to it. For all I know the paper he was using might even have been black. That would have been the final touch. Think about it, she said.
