Monument Maker, page 34
But wait, I asked Mariella, didn’t your late husband talk to you about his movies, didn’t he tell you where they were filmed, didn’t you accompany him on trips to scout locations, didn’t you read his storyboards, didn’t you discuss his ideas of travelling into the future via the past, and then I had a terrible thought, wait a minute, I said, was he successful, when you say he died of a broken heart is that a cover story, is it because his experiment was successful, is it because he escaped, and Mariella sighed and shook her head and then she said, well, of course, there is a sense that he is immortal, that he has escaped from time, that is true, because cinema says so, and of course I stopped her right there, you mean he starred in his own films, you mean he is in there somewhere, I asked her, you mean there are more films, and she told me there were many more films but that he didn’t so much star in them as secrete himself in them, as a stowaway in the hold of an old ship, she said, which of course struck me like a mortar shell, but can cinema really immortalise you, I asked her, well, she said, can a book, can writing yourself into a novel preserve you like an Egyptian, and of course I stopped her there again and reminded her that an embalmed corpse was no more alive than a skeleton in a coffin, whether the gods had their say or not, and that the point was to cross over the dreaded Styx and to make it to the other side, the point was an afterlife, not a death-in-life, which is what art is, and she said to me, you think art is death-in-life, she said, oh ye of little faith, she said, and then of course I brought up the paintings, you too, I said, you too had given up, you too attempted to bring to life something that was between the worlds, something spiritual, some kind of sign from the other side, but you became disillusioned, isn’t that true, isn’t that the word you used, I asked her, that you somehow lost the illusion that had served as the engine of your experiments with paint, with canvases stretched over the aether like spiderwebs or like netting where you thought you could catch all of these life forms, these entities, and at that I went to walk over to the paintings that lay piled against the wall and to reveal some more but then I remembered how in the cell the men had demanded that I turn over no more paintings, that I somehow avoid showing the hand of the future, which is rich after I have given away so much, and pointless too, but nevertheless I regained my composure and I sat back down and of course Mariella was as frustrated as I was, I don’t understand you, she said, you bring me tidings from the past, you in fact tell me that the past is here right now and that we have a captive audience of men in a jail cell during the war that you have somehow transported with you, and yet you tell me art itself is incapable of what you have done, does magic work, she asked me, is this magic that you turn your hand to, it would seem to be, in which case I must ask you simply, does art work, does art work to transform the world, to redraw reality, to rescue moments and ideas and personalities from the stream of time, and I replied with all I knew, I told her that trauma worked best, that suffering was life’s truest redeemer, that without it life wasn’t worth a scoff and that art, at best, was a Band-Aid, a bandage on an old rotten mummy, and she said, no, I don’t accept that, she said, when I told you my husband died of a broken heart, what do you think I meant, and of course I said, well, that he suffered, that his heart fell from a great height and was shattered, and she interrupted me and said, you can die from art too, you know, more than that, you can die into art, and I imagined a film reel covered in dirt and buried in the ground, a watercolour rotting in a cemetery, a paperback spreadeagled in an incinerator, a tomb with a collapsed entrance, afloat, on a stream.
Just then the topless boy with the single good eye interrupted me. We were back in the jail and the war was still on. Were there more films? he asked me. Did you find him, the Featurist? He wasn’t a Featurist, I told him. We were in the courtyard, in the shadows, in the middle of summer. Around us men walked in circles, stood naked, rolled improvised cigarettes, lay on the ground half-starved. He was someone who was using art and technology as a means of escape. Do you believe him? he asked me. Do you believe me? I asked in return.
The next film was a film of a zoo, I told him, a visit to the zoo. I believe it was the famous Zoological Garden in Berlin. The cages are empty, the fencing buckled, the compounds collapsed. Again the movie is silent, which makes it seem quite beautiful, somehow, the camerawork is very graceful, it seems to float through the wreckage as if it were on wings. There are no animals to be seen except for the swans and ducks that float serenely on the river. He pauses over an enclosure for polar bears. He zooms in. There is a white paw just visible behind a white rock. There are no signs of life. He crosses a large muddy field that is cratered with bomb blasts. There is a sign, Keep Off the Grass, and an upended picnic table. Behind it there is lion, a beautiful female lion, whose guts have been spilled. Further on there is a field of buffalo, dead, bleached in the sun. It is as if we are going back in time. There are snakes in the shattered remains of their glass cases, their bodies coiled tight, as if they had tried to protect themselves, as if snakes too could sense the future, and there are lizards, tiny insects with their legs held tragically in the air, and there is blood and there is gore where the animals have turned on each other. Outside, in the sunlight, there are dead apes. In the tops of the trees, too, there are bodies. Suddenly there’s movement in the distance, a thin dark shadow flitting between the trees. The camera freezes. There it is again. Is it a man on stilts picking his way through the dead bodies? Is it the Featurist? the boy asks me. There it is again. It’s some way off. It freezes, and it turns its head slowly and mechanically towards the camera. It is a stork, a solitary black stork. It stands motionless for what feels like an eternity, then it raises one foot after the other in an exaggerated movement and picks its way across the bodies of its companions. Why doesn’t it just fly away? the boy asks me. Why doesn’t it escape?
There are more men in our cell, men of different nationalities, countless conversations happening at once. With little room to lie down, we sleep on a string tied from one wall to the other that leaves deep indentures in our necks. An escaped prisoner is returned and displayed for all to see in the courtyard. He is given a mock crucifixion by the irreligious guards, one of whom pokes him in the side with an improvised spear in imitation of Longinus, the soldier of Rome. Everyone is forced to attend. The prisoner plays his role perfectly. My God, he cries, at the climactic moment, why have you forsaken me? However, his hands have been tied, not pierced through with nails. He is led off by soldiers with machine guns, but the crucifix is left propped up in the courtyard as a warning. The next time we will use nails, the captain says, and afterwards, in our cell, there is much debate about how painful it would be to have a nail hammered through your hand.
It’s not painful, the man with the dreadful harp tattoo on his arm claims, it’s the weight of your body when you are suspended from the cross that’s the problem. No, another one says, a new arrival with permanent dark-blue stubble and staring round eyes, that’s not true, there is a small platform for your feet in order to take some of your weight, he claims, otherwise the body would slide off in seconds due to gravity. Think how easily you can draw a knife through your hand. How easily? someone asked him. Very easily, he replied. Nonsense, the man with the harp tattoo replied, and in the context of the conversation the harp looked even more like a child’s drawing of the gates of heaven, they fix your feet with nails too, he said, that’s the whole point, have you never been to church? Only the Catholics nail the feet, the Scotsman with the paralysed bollock announced, the Protestants have him sort of hovering in front of the cross. They don’t show the nails. Suffering Christ, someone said. The Catholics love their suffering, that’s for sure, the Scotsman claimed. That’s not true, the tattooed Irishman said, the Protestants are much more attached to it. Then why don’t they show the nails? the Scotsman asked him. Because they can’t even take any pleasure in pain, he replied. That’s no answer, the Scotsman said. The Protestants don’t know they’re alive, the Irishman said. What, the Scotsman said, you have to be physically impaled on a cross to know you’re alive? In that case we’re the kings of the castle, he said, and with that there was much hilarity in the cell. Without suffering, the Irishman said, none of us would ever change. Suffering is the engine, he said, and he looked at me. I said nothing. The engine of what? someone asked him. The engine of love, he said, and again there was much mocking and hilarity. In that case I’m fucking Casanova, the Scotsman said, as he blew mock kisses to his cellmates. I felt a great confusion. I sat on the floor with my knees pulled tight against my chest. I took out my ID card and I looked at my old face. I wondered if right now he too was dreaming me, just as I dreamed of my older self and he looked back at me. My God, I said to my younger self, why have you forsaken me? Of course, I knew the answer. It was just hard to take.
There was talk of the war. The Allies have invaded Sicily. Italy is next to fall. Once more we fixed our eyes on the sea, the same sea that I had come to believe had been miraculously fixed years before our own detention, but as in the movie nothing appeared. I searched the horizon for a black stork in vain. Was he the black stork? the boy with the eyepatch asked me, the boy who by this point was wearing a top, a striped pyjama top that he had inherited from a dead man. You know, he said, like a symbol, like when you become something outside of yourself to make a point or to sum it all up? You think you can sum it all up as a black stork? I asked him. I believe so, he said. I wouldn’t have believed it years ago, but I do now.
There was more than a stork, I told him. There was a film of a room. A room with no windows or doors or perhaps there was a door behind the camera. What was in the room? the boy with the pyjama top asked me. Nothing, at first, I told him. Or so it seemed. How long was this film? he asked me. Hours, I told him, there were several reel changes. How do you know they were shown in the right order? he asked me. They were numbered, I told him, the film cans were numbered. What if they had been put in the wrong cans? There’s no way of knowing, I conceded. But there was an event, a central event, midway through the second reel, which made sense, as it formed the film’s axis. That’s what they call the Germans and the Italians and the Japs, the boy reminded me. The Axis Powers. How many reels were there in all? the boy asked me. Three in total, I told him. Okay, he said, the first one is Great Britain, the middle one is the Axis Powers and the third one is Russia. Mother Russia, he said, and he looked at me as if he had just said something vitally important and perfectly inscrutable. Okay, I said, so this event, this oddity (that’s you, the boy said), takes place in Germany, let’s say. Where in Germany exactly? the boy asked me. In the heart of Germany. That would be Berlin, the boy said. Berlin is not the heart of Germany, I told him. Berlin is the pulsating brain of Germany. Where is the heart? he asked me. It is buried beneath a tree in a forest, I told him. The Black Forest? he asked me. No, I said, it’s a forest outside Bayreuth that is reached by an unnamed road. Is it a pine forest? Yes, I told him, the kind of pines with high tops and tall branchless trunks covered in lichen. I know the type, the boy nodded, the type of forest you can get lost in and that is uncannily grim. And in this forest in the heart of Germany, which is a room with no doors and windows on a film reel buried beneath a tree and divided between the powers of the war, there is an object. What’s the object? A flashlight. A battery-powered flashlight? A battery-powered flashlight. What’s it doing? Shining. Shining? Shining in the dark. Shining on and off. Shining on and off? It seems to be set to some kind of programme. Like an SOS? Possibly. Where is it in the room? It’s on the floor in the middle of the room. Was it always there and it just became switched on? Impossible to tell, the room is dark, and it’s only when the flashlight comes on that you realise it is there. But you don’t know for sure? You can tell it’s a flashlight but if you look at the other reels featuring the same shot of the room, if you look at Great Britain and Mother Russia, as you said, it’s impossible to tell if the flashlight is still there, on the floor, turned off, or perhaps counting down, counting down to the moment where it will send this signal from the heart of Germany. Otherwise the room is dark? It’s shot in black and white and with expressionistic shadows. How long does the flashlight send out its signal for? I would say a good twenty-five minutes. Does it have a pattern, or does it vary? It has a simple pattern, though I can’t say for certain, because at one point I got up to make a cup of tea. You got up to make a cup of tea after the signal started? I wasn’t sure how significant it was, at first. It was the only thing that happened in a film that lasted hours and you weren’t sure it was significant? Well, it was the first time I had watched the full thing, how was I to know that there wouldn’t be more significant events to come? And there weren’t any? No, there was nothing else of significance. Was the movie silent? Yes, the movie was silent. When you came back from making your ill-judged tea, what was happening? The flashlight was still flashing on and off. How long between the ons and offs? Seconds. And what did Mariella say? She said, look, someone has left a flashlight on the floor. She actually used the word someone? Yes, she said someone. Even though her husband had made the movie and it wasn’t as if someone else had just wandered through the set and dropped a flashlight on the floor and walked off? Unless her husband hadn’t realised there was a flashlight in the dark of the room and he was as surprised as any of us when it made its presence known. Do you think he had asked the room a question and that the flashlight had responded in code? It’s possible. In wartime everything speaks in code. And you saw nothing else, you’re sure of that? Yes, well, the darkness seemed to settle down a little after the appearance of the flashlight. What do you mean? I mean it was as if the darkness bled back into itself, as if the shadows withdrew slowly, as if there was a retraction somehow, as if the atmosphere slithered, somehow, back into place. You mean like a snake, like a snake in a reptile house? It could just be the flashlight talking. Wasn’t The Flashlight the name of a superhero? A comic book? I think that’s correct. What was his superpower? A blinding beam of light, I would guess, a light so bright it could stun. Do you think the flashlight just ran out of batteries? What do you mean? When it stopped, I mean, do you think it had just run out of juice? Maybe it’s as significant or as insignificant as that. Still, I don’t think so, the boy said, I think it’s telling us something. Like what? The ocean outside our window, a black stork in a bombed-out zoo, a flashlight in an empty room in the heart of Germany buried in a reptile house beneath a tree in an uncanny forest. I think it’s saying we have lost our way. I think it’s saying we should never have left the sea.
