| |
| |
|
|
Five days at his place, in his hometown, in a fertile plain that was once a seabed, a long time ago. There are three of us; there are other faces that enter the picture occasionally but they are irrelevant. She and I don't want them but we tolerate them. He knows them, or at least thinks he does. That is, he’s spent many hours with them, spoken to them and thought about them. But he never quite grasps what makes them, his eyes abandon their features after a while, since he keeps moving, inventing new things to do, places to be. His body disengages him, makes him abandon everything.
Then there is the house in which he spent decades, and memories are varied. It’s a rare location to contain him, it pre-dates him and remains the cast of the transformations he undergoes. (The seabed that the plains once were.) This house the mirror, a container, a cast.
|
|
|
There are many doors inside the house and the last one I find the evening before we are to leave. Almost in the middle of the living room, it seems impossible to overlook once the eye has recognised it. But it takes five days and several hundred snapshots for it to appear, obstructed by a rocking chair. We joke about it. It doesn’t lead to the space on the other side of the wall. If we tried to open it, it wouldn't offer access to the corridor. It is a portal, another dimension awaits.
Later, alone in the corridor, I look at it again. The fact that I hadn't noticed it at all assigns it special status now. If I opened it to reveal the view of the living room, I would find everything as expected. I would walk from this space to that, sit on the couch, switch the TV on. Everything would look just the way it should but this would be an illusion. I would be somewhere else, someone else, staring at the screen.
|
| |
|
The graveyard tour, as he termed it, was the tour of memories. It was the tour of past lives, which he could not access any more; a tour of the dead people he once was. It was also the map of places where the dead lived.
Before we went to Bečej, he talked about opening the attic for us. We would climb the narrow ladder and rummage through things no longer of use, old photographs, childhood comics. We would dig through his past, unearth forgotten things, and he’d talk us through his memories. I never understood the meaning of the ritual, or the roles she and I were expected to play. The day we arrived he said that the attic was full of creatures waiting to be fed the visitors. They’ve arrived, he would whisper to the demons, and then offer us the cake his mother had left in the fridge. We laughed about it but avoided the attic.
|
| |
|
There is a double image here: his mother is on holiday and the father is absent. And although he is alive and well, lying on a beach next to her, he is missing from the picture.
There are several photographs of the father we are shown, and two paintings he did after one of them. In it, the father is in his fifties. He has a beard and thick-rimmed glasses. His nose is long, the eyes void of expression. He is there, in the photograph, inside the frame, nothing more. It is a photograph is of someone lost, a missing person.
|
| |
|
The son is on a beach, a different one. He looks at the naked bodies around him, notices the ones who resemble the father. Blonde, fair-skinned. Heavy. Later, he will follow them to the nearby woods. Much later, he will make the connection and laugh his high-pitched laugh.
The closest we got to grave digging was when he showed us his paintings, dating back to when he was fourteen. He said he went speechless the first time he was offered money for one of them. He kept painting after that, but avoided investing too much in them, knowing they’d be sold and he’d never see them again. I asked him to give me one of the recent ones but he said he couldn’t part with it, he needed it for an exhibition, one he might put together in the future.
The graveyard tour included a park where he’d played as a child. There was a long, low-lying building in the middle of it. As we drove past, he said it was an infirmary. There is a link between the children playing in the park, the noise they make, and the building behind.
|
| |
|
Start again.
There were four of us in this friendship. Aleksandar, Tanja and I travelled to his hometown that summer. The other girl, the blue-eyed one, couldn’t come. We hung out with another girl in the town, Aleksandar’s childhood friend, and she became the substitute fourth figure. They share the name: Jelena.
The other day Tanja told me that Aleksandar was on medication. This came months after I’d realised that she had occasional slippings herself. When I sing in the church at service, I see butterflies, she’d said. Right, you see butterflies. We left it at that. Only much later this came back to me, literal and bare: she sees butterflies. And she lets it pass, like that.
The fourth character, the original Jelena. She arrived in London and I saw for the first time the insatiable appetite in her. It is all happening now and it all needs to be taken in, right now. We were in Tokyo Diner, in Soho, and I was taking photographs of her. there was a map of Japan on the wall behind. I remember trying to frame the islands without losing her face. Everything was too close: her face, the wall behind it, my camera, my face. She kept eating. I never saw the photograph since it was taken with her camera but it was one of those prints that developed in my eye in a way no camera can register. The shot taken before the shutter opens.
|
| |
|
On the second day we went for a swim in the river. We laid out our picnic gear on a jetty, it bobbed with every step we made. There was a woman with two small girls at the other end, they spoke in a language we couldn’t locate. Every time the girls jumped in the river the woman shouted: Bravo, and laughed a small, reassuring laugh. Once the girls got out of the water the jetty was quiet.
You can hear the music coming from the café behind us. It is far enough. Occasionally, Aleksandar recognises a song and hums the tune for a while. He is reading a magazine and comments on its contents. His name is in an article and I take the magazine and scan the pages, but I can’t find the two words that constitute his name. Tanja and Jelena (the substitute) are talking. I keep interrupting my reading to listen to what they say. I pretend to read again, but the sentences never cohere; I can’t find his name.
I finger the page. He is next to me and there can be no conceivable connection between the surfaces I touch and the body to my left. The page reflects sunlight. He puts the headphones on and closes his eyes. I ask to hear what he’s listening to, but return the headphones after a couple of beats. The tune doesn’t match the drowsy look in his eyes. The sun makes them yellow.
The girls started talking. I got up and left the deck and went back to the shadow of the café on the shore. From up here, the river looked still. On the outside now (I could feel the droplets on my skin), I observed the place where my body had been a few minutes ago. I lifted the bottle and brought it to my mouth.
After a while, Jelena joined me. She had wrapped her body in a towel, and sat at the table with arms crossed over her chest. Minutes passed. She went inside, and I could hear her voice. Once she had her drink she was back and we sat in silence for a while. Shall we go and watch the boys play volleyball, she asked. We left the other two on the jetty.
There was an amateur match going on, boys paired with mature men. The audience was seated along the path, by the river, and watched the game with their backs to the water. This bothered me. Like travelling on a train and not facing ahead, all you can see is where you’ve been.
We sat to one side. A ball flew in my direction and I kicked it back to the players. Its trajectory was slow, I couldn’t wait for the focus to shift away. Then light changed from afternoon to dusk in the space of a few seconds. The river turned to lead. I looked up. The game was interrupted, we got up and rushed back. The other two had already packed the towels and were ready to leave. On the way back we passed a rusty shell of a car, partly submerged in the river. It struggles to get away, Tanja said. Escape the pull of the riverbed. It’s like quicksand, she concluded. What, he said. I laughed but she remained absorbed in the image she’d created.
We sat inside the car as the rain came down. On time, I said, and felt the storm find its way inside my body. We looked at the green of the trees from behind the windshield. Aleksandar drove across the dike, then suddenly stopped. Look at it. I love this view, he said and sighed theatrically. I regret I didn't tell him to switch the engine off then. We'd sit in the car and be happy.
|
| |
|
The dike follows the curve of the river, which folds onto itself at one end of the view. If you look in that direction, you see a solid strip of trees, backdrop to the lighter green of the dike. The dike repeats the curve the trees inscribe and this seems miraculous.
There are photographs I never took that clarify what happened. The story lost in the spaces between the images made and the ones intended. Like the three monkeys. I had a brass figurine when I was a child. I used to look at it, unclear about their meaning.
|
| |
|
The girl who is not from Belgrade, the Jelena that comes with the scenery, is big. Her small, regular features are sparse signs etched directly in the flesh. She lived for a few years in Belgrade then gave up and returned to the town. She ate more after that. Even before that she was big, Aleksandar says. Regular swimming never seemed to make the weight go away, it just made her body firm, he says. Hard flesh.
|
| |
|
We went out for cake on two occasions. The first time, it was all four of us. We picked the cakes carefully then sampled from each other's plates. It was late at night and the women behind the counter responded in their slow, northern drawl. The neon lights inside the bakery made the room look green.
The second time, it was just the three of us. It was daytime and we sat outside, at one of the plastic tables. Its top was a large, intricate lace. We’d bought a toy from a Chinese shop nearby, a cotton hamburger with eyes and a smile. It sang a song every time you hit it, three verses, the same tune. We took turns hitting it. You had to hit hard to get the music.
|
| |
|
On the third day, we took a journey out of town. We drove past low family houses with their pitched roofs and washed out façades, past rare multi-storey buildings decorated with floral patterns in concrete; we kept driving, came to a petrol station, re-pressurised one of the tires. We drove out of town then, down the road that ran in a straight line through the fields, nothing but turned earth and cloudless sky. Occasionally, the road was lined with shrubbery, which obstructed the view of the perfect flatness around. I had to lower my camera then and wait for the view to reappear, the view of nothing in particular. Then the road passed through a tunnel of towering trees with small, immobile leaves. We drove for a while. Aleksandar turned around and drove back. I asked why there, what was significant about the spot. He explained that it was the only place where you could turn. Otherwise you'd be driving for miles and never be able to come back without driving off the road and into a ditch. We headed home.
|
| |
|
The other day, as I was packing my things for the move to a new flat, I came across a stack of photographs.
I carefully select all the photographs I take and place them in an album. This usually takes several hours, as I am particular about the order. If they are not in an album, the photos haven't passed the selection process: they have either been left out because they weren’t good enough (framing, focus) or because they are too similar to others. These go in an envelope, together with the film. I occasionally revisit them and decide to move some up the ranks.
These photos were out, neither in an envelope nor in an album. The one on top was of a man driving, road visible through the windscreen, rear-view mirror reflecting his eyes. Another photo of Aleksandar from Bečej, I thought but then realised I was looking at the face of my father.
There is a man in the driving seat, a woman next to him. I am sat at the back, holding my camera, taking snapshots of whatever is around – this is how it used to be decades ago, when I travelled with my parents.
I read somewhere that complex landscapes give birth to multitudes of divinities. Only the flatness of deserts and plains, monotonous and endless, could give birth to monotheism.
I am stranded with copies of my father and my mother, modulated, in an empty landscape. I stare at the back of the man’s neck and feel the woman’s presence.
|
| |
|
The bathroom is pale peach, with matching fittings. Directly above the bathtub there is a small window overlooking the top of the pitched roof of the house opposite. The rest of the window frame is filled with sky. I undress and step inside the tub. The pressure is low and it takes some time to wash the soap off. After a while, my mood changes. I seem to be standing in the middle of a landscape, which lacks any conceivable purpose. It is a bathroom – a toilet, washing basin, towels arranged in a dusty pile on top of the washing machine – but the feeling won't go away. Something is missing, all these familiar objects are just a clever stage set. I try to wash as fast as possible and, having wrapped myself in a towel (which doesn’t absorb water but spreads it around) I walk out into the empty, silent corridor, with a single plant next to a narrow window.
|
| |
|
I forgot to take the camera out of the house and into the summer kitchen, a separate room in the yard, linked to the house by a narrow concrete path with a small terrace. The breakfast terrace. The kitchen was square and dirty, part of the outside. On the third morning I decided to clean the fridge. I wiped the top, cleaned the remains of spilt syrup, removed the dry, dusty branches of a plant. I continued to wash the fridge, until I reached the freezer. I would have to bend considerably to remove the dirt there. It bore traces of kicking and was generally dirtier than the top part, so I stopped there, right at the line of the lower door.
Tanja was washing the dishes. I told her what I was about to do but she said nothing. Then she changed her mind. I wouldn’t, she said. You don’t know if he’d mind. I went ahead anyway, thinking about intrusions. When Aleksandar walked in he laughed. He dismissed it as my own peculiarity, not a comment on him, or the kitchen. But I did wonder.
|
| |
|
There is a separate room off the kitchen, a small, dark storeroom with jars of jam, cordials and pickles. Right in front of it, there is a couch covered in dark, coarse material. On the second day I realised it was the centre of stillness, the periphery of all the action in this small space. There could be another three or four people in here and if I were to lie there I could observe everything yet remain removed. With my head low and facing the entrance, it was the perfect watchtower. A trench. And whatever was in the storeroom could be controlled from here.
During the day, the light shone through the mosquito net that covered the entrance. On the third evening we had guests for dinner. By the time they arrived it was dark.
|
| |
|
His ex-boyfriend joins us. He is handsome, with dark eyes the outline of which I try to sketch in my mind but can't capture. Until I realise that the peculiarity is not in the shape but in expression: his eyes reflect nothing. Two holes on a smooth surface.
I remember coming face to face with the statue of Antinous, Hadrian's adolescent lover, in an empty museum in Delphi. I turned a corner and sensed a presence, realising with a delay that it was a statue. It tricked me into believing it was alive. Until I saw its eyes, that is.
I was in the living room, taking pictures of the cupboard, its compartments and the objects in them. I kept trying to find the perfect angle. Then I realised I wasn’t alone, the ex-boyfriend was sitting in the armchair to my right. I straightened my back, took another couple of seconds to frame and took the shot.
|
| |
|
There is a dog in the backyard, a Rottweiler. She lives in a cage. There isn't much space for her to pace, so she sits in front of the doghouse. The day we arrived, the space needed cleaning. Aleksandar set to work, and I realised I had never seen him be physical. He looked at ease, with his body, with filth.
|
| |
|
In his early twenties Aleksandar spent a month in an abandoned house in the town, working long hours during a particularly cold winter. He transformed the ruin by erecting a series of frames inside the rooms, which he’d made and assembled on site.
There was a party on the night of the opening. People drank, music was played. All signs were written in two languages: Hungarian and Serbian.
|
| |
|
The Hungarian Catholic Church choir gave a concert in which men were dressed as women and women dressed in black, Aleksandar said. The choir regularly sings in the Catholic church, there is none in the Orthodox. Tanja thinks about this and imagines her choir from Belgrade inside the empty building. They would bring the place to life. A melody weaves its way through her head, carried by the voices of people who aren’t there.
|
| |
|
I asked him about the town and he said: it's a place that imploded. It used to have industry, to be the cultural centre of the region. Then things changed and the town lost its relevance. Two stories remain from the era of prosperity: the story of an heiress to a land-owning family who had the town hall built and was rumoured to sleep with her dogs. The second one is of a landowner and a poet, their graves side by side.
He told us this on the day we went to the castle. We climbed its low tower and looked around at the landscape. He got the key to a nearby chapel and we spent time inside. I took photographs of him with icons in the background, light cutting across his face, illuminating the face of the Virgin.
(The woman sleeps with her dogs. Her name is associated with the town hall, which is in the main square. There are two churches in the square, one orthodox, the other catholic. There were two dogs, she slept with them. Two temples, a woman unwed.)
As we leave, Tanja looks distracted and drifts into the ploughed field behind the chapel. There is a small grove nearby (in the flatness a place of secrecy) and I step into the long grass to urinate. The two of them are behind me, near the church. I am alone.
There is an empty pool behind the castle. Aleksandar and Tanja climb the fountain in the middle. In the photograph I took, she is still climbing, he is already at the top, looking into the fields. I never enter the pool. I circle and leave. Later, he climbs out and lies on the grass and I take more photographs of him, of his splayed body.
|
| |
|
If I look back at the photographs of the bedroom now, I can see more than I remember. The big cupboard, next to the bed, had its door ajar from the day we arrived. It revealed a shadow, as solid and material as an object. I took some photographs, but despite the flash, or because of it, the shadow looks impenetrable. The cupboard is a terrain traversed by a couple of crevices.
The room had two reproductions above the bed, a boy and a girl, in sentimental poses. There was also a tripartite mirror on top of a chest of drawers. The mirror looks medieval in what it offers: three hinged frames, which you can close to protect the image. Except this one only shows three different angles on the room. It can’t reflect faces, it is positioned at waist level and there is no space for a chair. There is a small bouquet of dry flowers instead.
On the third night I placed my head on two pillows. The light was switched on. I was about to read. As my body sank, I realised I could see my face reflected in the mirror. The middle panel showed the full length of my body, severely shortened by the perspective. The light of the lamp made my skin look grey.
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
