The champagne and caviare were being handed round by sleek young women in white shirts, red bow ties, very short black skirts, spike heels and black stockings that ended in a flash of thigh and red suspenders. These girls were provided by the caterer, Fizzy Lizzy, and would be somewhere else tomorrow; I as permanent staff was in a little black dress that was almost as short as the pelmets of the Fizzy Lizzy cupbearers but I wore tights instead of stockings and suspenders; this didn’t discourage Nikolai Chevorski from groping my bottom but he was just over five feet tall so his world-view was closer to the ground than most people’s.
While his frizzy-permed friend was talking to George Rubcek the as-yet-unmet Giles made his way through the minglers and networkers to me, his sexuality shimmering like a motorway mirage. ‘You look too real for this kind of thing,’ he said to me.
‘That’s because I’m getting paid for it. On my own time. I’m no realer than you are.’ I was reading him the way you read the little film blurbs in the TV schedule: ‘Predictable story attractively packaged but short on plausibility,’ this one said. It’s difficult for me to believe how cynical and naive I was at the same time back then. Not, however, cynical enough to avoid a man who needed improving.
I have a good collection of videotapes, among them favourites that I’ve watched several times by now: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; We Don’t Want to Talk about It; The Red Squirrel; Junkmail; Near Dark; The Match Factory Girl. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I identify with all of the women; in We Don’t Want to Talk about It I feel so sad for Marcello Mastroianni who falls in love with and marries a dwarf who leaves him to join a travelling circus; in The Red Squirrel I’m convinced that Julio Medem used the idea of Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, a tale of the American Civil War in which an apparent escape and return home are revealed to be happening only in the mind of a hanged man at the moment of death. I think the love story in The Red Squirrel is a posthumous one and I am haunted by the if-only of it. I love the unreliable postman in Junkmail who, having copied the keys left in a young woman’s mailbox, is hiding in her flat when she attempts suicide. He pulls her naked and dripping from the bath in which she’s overdosed and is about to drown and I’m so happy for them every time although God knows what they’ll do with each other after he follows her offscreen at the end. In Near Dark I’m touched by the vulnerability of the vampire girl and delighted when her lover unvampires her with a transfusion of his healthy blood.
Of these films the one that stays with me most is The Match Factory Girl, written and directed by Aki Kaurismaki. The match factory is in Finland, Helsinki maybe. We see the logs that once were living trees being stripped naked; we see them reduced to sheets of matchwood, we see boxes of matches, each one the same as the others, on a moving belt as the machinery clanks out the minutes and hours. Day in and day out Iris (pronounced Earriss) checks the boxes of matches as they come off the production line. Kati Outinen is Iris; she’s one of those unpretty actresses who can look beautiful or plain as required: in this film she looks plain. Iris lives with her middle-aged mother and the man who’s moved in with her mother. She hands over her pay every week and cooks and cleans for them while they drink vodka (none for her). On the TV news a man stands in front of a line of tanks which come to a stop in Tiananmen Square.
Iris goes to a dancehall where she is the only woman not asked to dance. She sits alone by the wall while the ensemble plays a tango and the man at the microphone sings, with subtitles:
Somewhere beyond the ocean
there is a distant land
where warm waves softly caress
its ever-joyful sands.
Varieties of lovely flowers
bloom all the year around.
No cares, no worries there,
no troubles, and no gloom.
Oh, if I could only reach
that land of dreams some day,
then I would never, ever fly
from paradise away.
The singer wears a white suit, a burgundy shirt, a white tie. He’s clean-shaven, has pomaded black hair. He’s backed by a violin, guitar, accordion, and drums. Behind the musicians is a backdrop on which a few trees droop wistfully against a glaucous sky as the couples revolve to the music. That tango and the words of the song open the floodgates to a sadness that doesn’t seem to be particularly mine; it’s a universal sadness. A singer and four musicians and a tango with a green-sky backdrop in a place of ice and snow!
Next payday Iris doesn’t give the whole pay envelope to her mother; she buys a red party dress, fixes herself up, and goes to a place with dancing and a bar where she’s picked up by a man who takes her home, sleeps with her, leaves some money on the bedside table the next morning, and goes off to work. This man (his name is Aarne) wants nothing more to do with her and when she asks to see him again he takes her to dinner and tells her to go away.
Iris is pregnant from that one night and she hopes for a happy family life with Aarne. He tells her to get rid of the baby and gives her money. She steps in front of a car, is knocked down, and loses the baby. While she’s in hospital her mother’s partner comes to give her an orange and tell her to find somewhere else to live.
When she gets out of hospital her brother takes her in. She buys rat poison and goes to Aarne’s flat where she says she won’t bother him any more but wants to have a goodbye drink with him. She puts rat poison in his drink, then goes to a bar where another man makes an approach. She puts rat poison in his drink, goes home, is allowed in by her mother, lays the table, and puts rat poison in the vodka for her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.
As she waits for them to die we hear the tango singer and his ensemble again and read the subtitles:
Oh, how could you turn
all my sweet dreams
into idle fancies?
The song continues and we see Iris again at her job in the match factory as the police come for her. Having stopped the tanks, she goes with them quietly.
When you give everything
only to be disappointed
the burden of memories
gets too hard to bear.
Why have I got so many videos that I watch more than once-made-up people acting out made-up stories? The people and the stories aren’t real but the ideas are: the ideas of true love and happiness, of lost love and sadness, life and death. We get such a little bit of time and it’s so hard to find a life-story that works for us. Why have I given the story of The Match Factory Girl and taken up all this space to do it in? I’m not sure. Iris’s story is nothing like mine but there’s something about it that won’t let go of me. Those tango songs!
11
Adelbert Delarue
Truly, it is not that I am simply a wealthy sybarite. (Are there poor sybarites?) No, to me there is more than that. I do not flaunt myself as a doer of good works but in that sphere I am not idle, not unknown. I have given thousands of millions of francs to all the major charities and some that are minor, even unknown. Why do I mention this? Life is a fast-flowing river of moments; to step into this river is to find it each time never the same. Last night I had a dream in which … No, I won’t talk about it just now. Everyone has dreams.
All the same, every morning is different, is it not? I wake up with Victoria warm beside me smiling in her sleep; last night was good; life is good. Certainly the dead don’t have much fun. It seems I am given to reflection today. I ponder long the Crash Test toy that aroused my interest in Roswell Clark.
I do not look back over what I have written here before this and I do not want to; I speak from the ever-changing moment. I think I have a few words said on the metaphor of this toy, the profundity of it. These thoughts remain with me. We forward go at speed; we are stopped, WHAM! You, I, the world. ‘Even the sea dies,’ said Lorca in his Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías long before anyone knew about pollution or global warming. Even the sea dies.
I have given to many of the Hol
ocaust and Holocaust-Survivor charities. Naturally nothing goes away. This, I think, is the first law of the remembering animal: nothing goes away. Gottfried von Peng, my father, has gone away but not as far as Genghis Khan, for example. He died full of years and billions. Death as a Friend is the title of a drawing by Rethel in which Gevatter Tod in hooded garb and sporting the scallop shell of the Santiago pilgrim tolls the bell for the old man who in his church tower has come to the end of his journey. Death of course can afford to be friendly — no one comes with a scythe to cut off his life.
The dream: Victoria and I were naked in the Rolls-Royce; Jean-Louis was driving us around the Périphérique … No, I don’t want to be telling this, it’s bad luck.
I want something from Roswell Clark. What it is I do not know. Certainly I have with this money primed the pump. What will he make? Of himself. What will he of himself make?
12
Roswell Clark
No word from Delarue since the letter in which he wanted to know what my talent was dreaming of, the letter in which he said he must not apply pressure. Pressure, of course, was exactly what I was now feeling. He’d been very generous in his three commissions and I’d taken his money; now he was expecting something of me. What? I felt it heavy on my back and clinging like a giant squid.
What was my patron doing now? Enjoying himself probably, without a care in the world as he waited for the mouse of me to bring forth some kind of mountain. My workroom is on the top floor of my house, with a north-facing skylight and large windows. The daylight in that room has a cool objectivity that is sometimes a little more than I can handle; a bad drawing looks worse in that light; a clumsy carving looks clumsier. My saws and my chisels and gouges, my rasps and rifflers hang in their proper places on the wall. If I were to die today they would still be there, saying, ‘What has he accomplished with us? What did his work amount to?’ Sometimes I feel as if the world is closed to me and I’m walking around and around it looking for a door.
There were scraps of lime in the bin where I keep leftover bits. These neat blond pieces of wood had once been parts of trees with leaves that stirred in the wind. Trees are living things; they have souls, they have significances; Odin, hanging on his tree through days and nights, acquired wisdom; Absalom was caught in a tree by his hair and was killed; Christ was crucified on the tree of his cross. Walk into a wood and you can feel the trees listening.
This bat tattoo, that’s a laugh. Did I think it was going to get me off the ground, make me fly? And now I feel as if the bat is expecting something from me along with Delarue.
I looked at the china nutcracker on my work-bench; he wouldn’t let expectations get him down, he’d crunch them: chomp, chomp. Of course he has the jaws for it. I mostly have music going when I’m working and I thought it might help to get me started now. I went through my CDs and selected a compilation of Argentine tango bands, and when it reached Carlos Gardel doing ‘El Carretero’ I began to feel a little more comfortable. I understood only a few of the words but I thought a carretero might be a man with a cart and a donkey. The song has an evening sound; I saw the carter making his way through dimly lit streets past low houses and I had the feeling of having already done a day’s work. It was still morning, however, and I hadn’t done anything at all, hadn’t earned the evening feeling, so I stopped the music and went out. ‘Take me somewhere,’ I said to my feet, and they headed for the North End Road.
In a few minutes I found myself at the Church of St John, standing in front of the fibreglass Jesus and thinking about wood and Tilman Riemenschneider. He did crucifixions and lamentations, he did annunciations and assumptions and he was never extravagant with facial expressions; he only went so far and he let the wood do the rest: Mary’s face when she receives the news of the Immaculate Conception and her face when she looks at the dead Christ, the face of Jesus living and dead and the faces of the mourning women — all of these listen with the ghosts of trees and now there is fibreglass. ‘Surf’s up,’ I said.
‘You talking to Jesus?’ said a deep voice behind me.
I turned. It was a member of the low-budget drinking community. I’d seen him the last time I was at the church: a black man, tall and burly, wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and holding a can of John Smith. He had the face of the black policeman in one of those buddy movies where the partner is white. His manner was discursive rather than aggressive. ‘Fibreglass is OK for surfboards,’ I said, ‘but Jesus deserves wood.’
He sipped his beer and thought about this for a while. I wondered where he stood on aesthetics.
‘Did you come here to pray?’ he said.
‘No. Did you?’
‘Prayers are for children.’ He pointed to the brass plaque in memory of the Fulham and Chelsea Battalion of the Church Lads’ Brigade. ‘Were their prayers answered?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘So you’re not praying. What do you want from Jesus?’
‘Nothing as far as I know.’
‘You wouldn’t be standing here,’ he said like a patient tutor, ‘if you weren’t looking for something from him.’
‘I don’t know. Messages, maybe.’
‘“By the rivers of Babylon,’” he said, ‘“there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’”
‘Is that a message?’
‘It’s a psalm, Number 137.’
‘I know that. Do you remember Zion?’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
My mother had said that Zion was where it was a whole lot better than now and it was where you never get back to. The smell of oil and metal, cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s came back to me with the lamplight and shadows of my father’s workshop. Whatever he handled, whether a hammer or saw or a piece of wood, he handled in a way that made you feel good. He showed me how to use a screwdriver and a hammer and I tried to hold them the way he did. With an empty cotton spool, what they call a reel here, a washer, a rubber band and a wooden match he made me a spool tractor that crept along the basement floor until it was stopped by the skirting board. ‘I guess everybody does,’ I said. ‘There are all kinds of Zions.’ Thinking, as I said that, that the Zion I remembered had been Babylon to my mother.
‘There’s a lot of Babylon around here,’ he said, and went back to his colleagues. I made my way home slowly, seeing the spool tractor crash slowly into the skirting board.
13
Sarah Varley
Every month Burnside Auctioneers in Ealing send me a catalogue; I make a pot of Earl Grey and start circling the lot numbers that look promising. It’s a three- or four-cup job to get through it and budget my fantasies, cosy reading all the way. The viewings are on Tuesdays, the auctions on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Burnside is nothing grand like Sotheby’s or Christie’s; it’s small and cramped and not comfortably laid out. The viewings are always a hurly-burly with people jostling one another and idly curious non-buyers taking up space and standing in front of things I want to see. Last Tuesday I found nothing terribly exciting in my price range. There was Lot 186, ‘A GERMAN .800 ART NOUVEAU 13-PIECE FRUIT SET by P & S Bruckman, the handles decorated with figures from mythology, cased £120-£180’. I was willing to go to one-thirty-five on that. With commission I’d be paying one-sixty so I’d try to resell it at one-ninety and would take one-eighty if I had to. It was nothing that made my heart beat faster and obviously I wasn’t going to get rich on it.
There were various other lots I was prepared to bid on, mostly silver or silver plate which I’d been having some luck with. I’m always hoping for treasures that others have passed by and a cardboard box caught my eye: Lot 339 was ‘A collection of treen’. No estimate. It was a jumble of unimpressive wooden artefacts: carvings of Krishna, Lakshmi, and Ganesha from the duty-free at Bombay, some boxes that might have been Tunbridge ware but weren’t, a miniature shoe, and a higgledy-piggledy of other bits and pieces not likely to set the world on fire.
Among the bits and pieces, all the way at the
bottom of the box, was a painted wooden hand pierced by a wooden spike that nailed it to a fragment of a cross. The hand had been broken off a little way up the wrist and the whole thing was, by my tape measure, three and seven-eighths inches long. The painted blood was almost worn away as was the flesh colour. Shocking, that hand — the authority of it. It was a right hand; the index and middle fingers were curved reflexively around the spike in an effort to support the weight of the sagging body. Death by crucifixion, I remembered having read, was caused by the collapse of the diaphragm, and all of that pain and sorrow were in those two fingers. The carving was remarkable in the delicacy of its realistic detail, the beauty of the fingers and fingernails and wounded palm and veins of the wrist of that man whose symbolic blood was still drunk by his worshippers.
I know some hallmarks and some of the provenances of the things I buy and sell but I have vast areas of ignorance and this was from one of those. It was obviously very old, but although it probably came from something valuable it wouldn’t be worth much as a fragment. I wasn’t thinking of resale; I wanted it because it had spoken to me and couldn’t be ignored. I put it back in the bottom of the box and covered it with the higgledy-piggledy as well as I could, hoping to make Lot 339 as uninteresting as possible.
The next day at the auction I got the German art nouveau fruit set for one-thirty-five and I did all right with my other selections but although this is something I do for a living I was in a completely non-commercial state of arousal when Max Burgess, the auctioneer, called out, ‘Lot three thirty-nine, a collection of treen, possibly treasures for the discerning.’ Max is a gingery man, large and broad; he was a Petticoat Lane barrow boy before becoming an auctioneer and his style has nothing of the introvert. ‘Do I hear thirty-five?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t want to pass this by and later think: If only!’