Monument Maker, page 35
What if I told you the film was called Message to the Dead? That’s us, the boy in the striped pyjamas said. No, I told him, we’re not the dead, we’re the disappeared. Then where are the dead? he asked me. And why are they watching movies? I think it’s a film of an attempt to contact the dead, not a film for the dead to watch. Why can’t the dead watch movies? the boy protested. I mean, if they can watch an attempt to contact them why can’t they watch a record of an attempt to contact them? Who knows if every time the film gets shown they’re brought back to life, like a light in a darkened room? Why do we need to speak to the dead and what do we need to tell them? I asked him. Perhaps they’re lost, perhaps death isn’t clear, perhaps they need directions. To where? I don’t know, where do the dead go, to Jerusalem, to heaven, to Timbuktu? It’s a place in their mind that has to be resolved, I told him. But where are the minds of the dead? They’re in our mind too. So where does our mind need to go? To the fourth film. There’s a fourth film? Yes. But it’s a porno. No! It’s another lengthy one. It goes on for hours. Who’s in it, is Mariella in it? Yes, Mariella is in it. How does she look? Immaculate, ravaged. Who else is in it? I think it’s the husband, I told him. At last, he said. But I can’t be sure. Didn’t you ask Mariella? Yes, I said, we watched it together one evening and I said to her, is that your husband who is making love to you? And what did she say? She smiled, her eyes twinkled, end of story. Well, what did he look like? He had a muscular back, I can tell you that much. What about his face? That, unfortunately, is permanently buried in her hair over her left shoulder. You mean he never looks up? Not once. He just keeps going at it. In that one position for hours. Actually, it’s a loop, the lovers are caught in a loop, it seems to be a section cut from a much longer piece and then looped for hours. What about his buttocks? Not as tight as you might imagine. His legs? Athletic, a walker. What else? There is a marking on his left arm, some kind of tattoo, a tattoo of a woman, perhaps. So there are two women in the picture? he said. One woman, I told him, and a picture of a woman. A film is a picture too, he said. So it’s the missionary position? he asked me. A variant. What about her, how is she looking? Dissipated, enraptured, her hair cast back on the pillow. How long is the looped section? Twenty seconds or thereabouts. What about her legs? One is out to the side, the other is bent over his at a ninety-degree angle. Like The Hanged Man, the boy said, like the Gypsy Tarot? The Hanged Man is upside down, I told him. It’s all the same when you are making love, the boy shrugged. What is it they say about the hangman’s beautiful daughter, don’t the dead ejaculate when they’re hanged, something like that? Anyway, I said, interrupting him quite rudely, she’s wearing stockings, you’ll be pleased to know. What else? Heels, she’s wearing high heels. She is dressed for sex. Now we’re talking, he said. Does she caress his head, does she run her fingers down his back? No, she stretches her arms back above her head and holds on to the headboard. She’s doing a handstand, the boy marvelled, that’s acrobatic. What then? The whole thing repeats, I explained to him, he buries his head, he thrusts several times, she crosses her leg at an odd angle over his, she has a look of abandon, she stretches up—or down—and takes hold of the headboard and then we’re back to square one. What about her face, what about her lips? She gasps, I can tell you that much. Do we have a title? Yes, I told him. It’s titled Exodus. Someone is headed in the same direction as the dead, the boy said.
One day I was summoned to a meeting of mid-level British commanders in the courtyard during break. They looked like a gang of toughs. One of them had a scar like an antenna across his chest. Another had an Errol Flynn moustache. We hear you can predict the future, the Errol Flynn moustache said, well, not predict it but at least weigh it up a little, he went on. You’ve got a feel for it, is what I’m trying to say, he said. They didn’t want to believe in it, but they were asking me anyway. It was the closest they were going to get to military intelligence in here. In truth, most of the requests that I had received from fellow prisoners for information from the future had dried up. No one wanted to know. It’s better not to know, they said, and they nodded their heads at the wisdom of their words. Knowing what’s up ahead is enough to frighten the French, they said, and they nodded again. But this was different. The mid-level British commanders were planning a breakout. In truth, I should have known they were going to ask me, but there are all sorts of short-range tributaries running off from the main thrust of your life, you can’t keep your mind focused on all of them, although you can turn your attention to them, as and when. One thing I did know, I wasn’t going to join them.
I nodded, my expression heavy with the selfsame wisdom that the people who didn’t want to know showed. Yes, I said, I have a feel for it, I can help. If we were to abseil from our cell during the night and take off in a small rowing boat that had been secreted in the rocks down below, would we make it out? the one with the scar like an aerial asked me. I thought for a moment. I let my mouth hang open like a simpleton. I batted what was left of my eyelids as if I were computing the future. All I could say for certain is that I was sure I would never see them again. I predict success, I told them. Only insofar as you are never captured and returned to this hellhole. I used the word hellhole deliberately. I thought they might appreciate it. They sighed, and they nodded. Okay, they said. Then the one with the scar asked me an odd question. Do you know how I got my scar? he asked me. I got it in peacetime, he continued, without waiting for me to respond. That’s surprising, isn’t it, everyone is showing off new wounds, recent damage, whereas my cross—that’s what he called, it, his cross—is purely historical. How can anything be purely historical, I asked myself, particularly a cross? But I said nothing. I nodded and then I said, by way of lubricating the conversation, we all have our cross to bear. Tell me, friend, he said, how is your feel for the past? My feel for the past, I told him, is acrimonious. Do you know how I got this scar? he asked me again. Leave it, the Errol Flynn moustache said, but he continued to stare at me nonetheless. It doesn’t look like a cross to me, I told him. It looks more like an antenna. He nodded. That’s interesting, he said, that’s one way of putting it. Is that what happened to you? he asked me. No offence. What do you mean? I asked him. You became a receiver, he said. The second sight, he said. Ask me how I got the scar, he commanded me. I looked at him through the filthy pools of my eyes. You were lovelorn, I told him. And so you spilled your guts. With that I walked away. The next morning, they were gone. That night many more were made transmitters through collective punishment.
But don’t get the idea that prison life was eventful. There is a reason that we lived in the future, that we dissected the moments that lay up ahead, that we fantasised about mysterious directors that had died into their movies, that we stared at the ocean for hours on end willing a single miserable ship up from over the horizon. Don’t get the idea that there were regular daring escapes, that there were terrible routine punishments, that every day consisted of debating, debating, debating.
I watched my nails grow, broken and crooked as they were, in anticipation of grinding them down once more against the stone floor. I built a huge manor in my head, the kind of manor whose garden we would creep into as children and where we would climb trees and eat berries or steal apples. Now I peopled the room with characters of my own invention and with interesting pieces and with empty rooms, too, empty rooms where I could escape to sit on a single cobwebbed chair and sit there like a jailed Greek god, like the Greek gods of imprisonment, imperious and silent.
I have since come to learn that this is a common strategy for the paralysed and the locked away, to erect a great structure in your head, sometimes a grand ocean liner, other times a humble train travelling through the mountains, even, I have heard tell, a series of hollowed-out caves. Some days I would leave my stately home to wander the imaginary topography of the frozen-in-time, the ghostly canal boats, the boxy caravans, the strange theme parks topped with clown heads, the double-decker buses lighting out, the campsites hidden in the forest, the council houses with their rooms set aside, the abandoned aeroplanes behind high fences, the circus tents with their multiple rings, the tower blocks too, the huge factories, and the prisons too, the prisons and workhouses, prisons within prisons filled with generations past and to come, the Ferris wheels too, running backwards and turning forward and in their compartments faces, blurred faces of groups of people, huddled together, and I would return to my own dwelling where, in a back room at the top of a short flight of stairs, I had, quite deliberately, locked away my own heart.
Other times I would lie with my face to the wall and I would lick it. I would dart my tongue out for no one to see, each time leaving a dark mark on the wall. I would reintroduce parts of my body to itself, I would name my foot, say, and present it once more to my leg or my torso, even, to my hips, my arms to their shoulders, and in doing so I would remake myself on an hourly basis.
Other distractions included urinating on myself—a blessed release—eating paper, as I have said, walking in circles (which only lasted a few months until the cell was too crowded), grinding my nails, as I have said, attempting to jam my tongue between my teeth, counting the wrinkles on the roof of my mouth as you would the rings on a tree, attempting to levitate, to float free into the air, with varying degrees of success, counting the waves as you would the rings on a tree, imagining myself dropping from various heights into the cool spray of the ocean below, mock-translating people’s conversations to myself or sometimes to the boy with the pyjama top, imagining my face changing, transforming, imagining that it had once more, like a baby’s, started to grow and to change, and anticipating, up ahead, what my new face would become and, with it, what I myself might be, picturing myself as the man lying upside down on Mariella in the movie, her leg crossed over mine, the man with no face himself, picturing myself as the man who breaks out of the loop and who rises and who turns to the camera and who presents his new face to me for the approval of his old self, in prison still, his heart locked in a draughty manor still, in a region of ghosts, still.
But I spent most of the time living in the future, even when the future was awkward or not to my taste or not as I would have predicted it, which is odd because of course that was exactly what I was doing, though if I had predicted it, if I had chosen it, more properly, I would not have chosen to turn our parlour games and our spiritualist circle and my masked persona into a travelling show that played across clubs and theatres and ballrooms in the dying years of the 1940s and I call them the dying years with no hint of irony whatsoever.
I was aware, of course, to some extent, that Mariella saw in me the fulfilment of her husband’s quest, as nebulous and inchoate as it was, although we had established that his interest lay at the intersection of art, technology, fate and time, not to say the existence of heaven, which is what those films became to me, a sort of extended afterworld, moments of infinity, a love embrace, which is once and forever, heaven is a love embrace, I decided, and the films were too, which was obvious with the fourth one, the one with the lovers in bed, but I came to regard the others, too, as filled with an impossible longing, which is heaven, which is as futile and beautiful as holding on to your lover.
I thought of my own lover, my long-lost lover, who I kept locked in a room that I never visited. I told myself that I fooled people out of love, that I made them believe in heaven, that there was a spark inside a human being that could be activated by hope or fantasy just the same, by lies or by imagination, by flights of fancy, and who would say no to a flight of pure fancy if it’s at all a possibility? Why not, I told myself, if it all ends badly, regardless of belief, why not come up with a series of beautiful lies that would transform their relationship to suffering? And there was much suffering in the dying years of the 1940s.
But understand this. A lie is as real as a truth. If a lie, once established, rewrites the world in its wake, then it becomes a truth, if a lie becomes real then it is no longer a lie and tell me, friend, that we are not, already, in receipt of an infinity of lies, are we not balanced, as awkwardly as on a tower of mattresses, on so many lies that were the scales removed from our eyes and we were shown the truth it would appear as the greatest lie of all, indeed, that all the little truths that we have built our lives upon are themselves balanced on an awkward pile of mattresses and if we were to insist on their destruction, if we were to be as idiotic as to stand up for truth or some such impossibility, all that we would be left with would be a sad elephant on the back of a tortoise or whatever grotesque image passes for the first one, a sad mattress in an empty room, a piss-stained mattress or a bowl of flowers, a welcoming parent, a sappy cloud, a rainbow, the tail of a great peacock, a single, silent stone, so that when the women stood up in their seats in the great theatres of Greece, in the great run-down theatres, and asked me what had happened and would there be a great return, I would tell them, yes, yes there will, yes, and with that we were one more tear-sodden mattress closer to heaven, one elephant tusk closer, one sappy cloud away.
What struck me most in our travels across Greece in the dying years were the tall cranes, the cranes that stood high above the cities, cranes that stood motionless for the most part. Everywhere there was rebuilding, but it seemed to happen when you weren’t looking. As soon as your back was turned a new building sprung up, a new edifice was completed, a new train station came into view. Cranes can be made without the aid of cranes, so what is the point of cranes? The point of cranes is to tower into heaven and to move majestically slowly. Cranes are dancing about architecture. We would see them before we saw the city itself, their thin white bodies, like storks, of course, feeding in a pool of water. Beneath them, the suddenly completed houses. The small concert hall where we performed in Lamia was presided over by four white cranes. What is the term for a group of cranes; a mirage, a dissonance, a formation? Inside there was much glass, glass walls, glass doorways and a high mirrored ceiling. I looked up at myself, my face a blotch of pink, as we were escorted inside. I saw the posters on the walls. There, amongst the cabaret acts, the singers and opera stars, was a crude drawing of my stage persona. The Oddity, it read, the man from the future: their words, not my own.
Mariella took care of all business matters. I wasn’t to be approached. Of course, my looks, the extravagance of my wounds, held most people at a fascinated distance. With our hosts I would never wear my mask. My face served as proof of my presence in two worlds at once. At dinner I would remain silent and all questions were addressed to Mariella. Is it not a torment, our host at the concert hall in Lamia asked her, is it not a torture, he said, as he glanced in my direction, to be with someone who always knows what’s going to happen, who can second-guess, let us say, your every move? Mariella dabbed her mouth with a napkin, her pink lipstick staining the white cotton. I drooled some soup from the corner of my mouth. We never discuss our own future together, Mariella told him, that is, we never enquire. Come now, our host’s wife demanded of us, surely when you first met in order to, well, in order to ascertain his abilities, you must have asked him some test questions, asked him to provide you with some scenarios that you could then investigate yourself. Such as? Mariella asked her. She was expert in the art of turning a question around. Such as, the lady said, well, such as what shall we find if we enter the concourse of the train station at 12 P.M. tomorrow? Who shall I meet at the weekend? Is the notorious murder suspect innocent or guilty? Even better, who shall win the grand race? How will the price of gold fare? Will it be a boy or a girl? Before Mariella could reply I took my hand and placed it across her forearm as if to prevent her from raising it. She held her knife tight in her hand. Our hosts exchanged awkward glances. I’m sorry, the man said, please excuse my wife. Every time, it worked like a charm.
Before the curtain rose we would play a rare 78 recording of Scriabin’s “Étude Op. 8 No. 12” in order to set the scene. I confess I knew nothing of Scriabin’s mysticism back then, of his harmonics of colour, his blurring of sight and sound, his own experience of voices, his occult cosmogony, his assumption of godhood, his own black mass, his great negation, his great affirmation. But I knew it to be a music of psychic tumult. The lights would drop in the theatre and with the aid of a rainbow of primitive lighting gels Scriabin would perforate the veil. I sat, masked and robed, in the centre of the stage, the sound of my own blood in my ears. The curtains parted to gasps from the audience. Good news, I would say, and I spoke it as if it were the echo of an echo, I bring good news.
