Black Mirror (19 page)

People in France speak
of the Occupation as though it existed in parenthesis, a pause in the continuum, a sequestered curved space in the proper syntax of history. But memory breaks open such hypothetical spaces. Parentheses only appear to possess containment.

 

When I think now of the Occupation it is all Cubist distortion.

Even during the
drôle de guerre
, the phoney war, we felt jagged anxiety in the pits of our stomachs. There were curfews and blackouts: the city became abstracted and strangely angled; and every day there was someone, who knew someone else, who knew for sure of impending disastrous invasion; or someone's relative who had a story about dismemberment in Belgium, or a whole family casually executed, or mass starvation. Tales and rumours striated the air like strafe; one felt clammy, alert and charged with imprecise dread.
Frances wrote from England to call me Home, but this was a ludicrous suggestion; I could not even contemplate it.

At first I was preoccupied by Leonora's condition. Late in 1939 Max Ernst was interned as an enemy alien — he too carried the wrong nation in his passport and documents — and Leonora was in Paris trying to secure his release. We went together to Government offices where she railed and wept and was driven to a distraction bureaucrats considered both typically female and typically English. She had nightmares about the French earth swallowing her lover, and woke beside me, in Jules' place, shouting out at the night, her blue face staring, her long hair disarrayed. Her anguish was terrible. She saw scary shapes on the ceiling and hallucinated guns at her temple. Ernst was finally freed with the intervention of the art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, but Leonora was by then incarcerated in a hospital in Spain, believing her belly was a mirror that reflected the details of war-time.

Peggy took Max Ernst with her to America; Leonora, eventually discharged, moved to live in Mexico. I saw neither of them again; we lost all contact.

 

Somehow, even now, I remember the beginnings of that time as a kind of 1940s newsreel. First there is an aerial view, almost generic, I suppose, of Parisians streaming away from the threatened city: they are all heading south with piled-up bicycles and rickety pushcarts, and with mattresses and rocking chairs strapped to the tops
of black shiny cars. They move with dull exhaustion at a slow-motioned pace. No one honks a horn or jumps the queue; it is a defeated procession, requiring the polite and unanimous gestures of defeat. There is a warm June sky, dappled with light puffs of cloud, and the call of birdsong, somewhere, and an illusion of rightness-with-the-world; then a swift camera sweep downwards to the square shapes of Panzer tanks lurching in equidistant formation along the boulevards; they are heavy and dark, with men in fat helmets perched like puppets on top. Swastikas flap from the Arc de Triomphe, and everywhere red and black banners drape the façades of public buildings. And there is Hitler himself, blandly murderous, his face already an icon schoolboys create with small smudges of charcoal. I never actually saw him, but in this movie-in-the-head he is ineluctably present; the famous, or infamous, bear such invasive familiarity.

So the city of Paris on a June day became a city of the Wehrmacht, and for me it was a period of shameful inertia. I closed down my responses. I became a
poupée
, a doll. Everywhere German soldiers appeared suddenly, and in packs, smuggling their evil intentions like a species of tourist. They book-browsed on the left bank and followed guides through Montmartre. They purchased perfumes, and silk stockings and miniature models of the Eiffel Tower. Officers partied at the Ritz, and enlisted men toasted and clinked beer steins in the smoky depths of the
speiselokals
. They also took a census of French Jews and deported them to death camps. And they tortured French men and women at
Rue des Saussaies, and at Rue Lauriston, and Avenue Foch. I could not bear to think of it. Our concierge dragged away. The fatal yellow stars. The knowledge of nightmarish brutalities, a few streets away. It was another kind of Surrealism, the Occupied city. Think of the sound of seven synagogues, exploding. Think of swastikas imposed everywhere in a spider-like montage. I had thought until then, naively, that anomaly was above all a principle of delight.

 

It is difficult to describe the experience of inhabiting a city so morally ambiguous.

Unable to sell paintings, I worked for a pittance in the kitchen of a small restaurant near the Palais Royal, one of many participating in the black-market economy. Guilty-looking men paid with handfuls of foreign currency; we never asked how they came to have these in their possession. They ate whatever meat or cheese was available, and left drunk, and reeling, scattering a few
sous
on the table behind them. We all despised them. In the streets we waited in long slow queues with our food coupons for a weighed portion of bread, or yellow beans, or a few ounces of margarine. Everyone was hungry. In the Bois de Boulogne desperate men trapped sparrows. Other people scavenged whatever they could. I remember there was no soap: I felt dirty and my clothes were worn and stained. As the Occupation continued, as atrocity was more apparent, I felt ever more dirty.

It was also a kind of hollowness; I emptied out. This was in part a consequence of desolating loneliness. Most of my fellow artists were somewhere in England or America; Jules, of course, had not returned. The Eluards stayed on in Paris and were members of the Resistance: they alone sustained me.

But when my body was occupied, when I knew my own concavity, the transformation was complete. I had been walking home one night, heading along blacked-out Rue St Honoré, down one of the side streets — Rue de Bourdonnais, I think — to the river at Pont Neuf, when I was accosted by three German soldiers. They began by calling out to me from the opposite side of the road; then one was suddenly on me, and had thrust me against the wall, and was tearing ineptly with fumbling fingers at the buttons of my clothes. Two others held my arms out in a crucifixion. Each of the soldiers in turn took me, standing up: I shall not go further into any details. It was Nusch Eluard, with her heart-shaped face, who enclosed me in a diamond-patterned blanket with satin-lined edges, and whispered comfort and sympathy, and unfurled a song in my ear, and lowered my head down slowly onto a white-frilled pillow, and stayed beside me, and watched over me, so that at last I slept. I slept as though, after all, I was still whole and unwounded. As though I was invincible.

 

But this history has no refuge of sleep to smooth and occlude it.

When I discovered I was pregnant I was not sure what to do. I did not want to become like Leonora Carrington, maddened by the idea of the war lodged in her belly, but I also wanted the child; I wanted to be a mother. The body too has a memory, and as my breasts filled out, as I began to feel my extra gravity and my shape-shifting power, I dreamt again of darling Louis Bell in the tunnel, with his lovely hands and the candlelight gilding his face. It was a reclamation. It was a return of something lost. I was reminded, perhaps perversely, of the trembling immensity of first love.

The restaurant owner, a melancholy-looking Italian vexed by the dark times, agreed to let me stay at work in the kitchen, and for a while I believe I was almost happy. The pregnancy distended not just my body but time itself: I dreamt frequently of Louis and Jules, often in conflation, and could see them again beneath my eyelids, youthful, sexually present, ablaze with optimism. I also daydreamed in the future-tense: my child would grow up happily and light-filled in a Non-Occupied Zone. We would find Jules and Hélène and make a complete family.

 

But at six months the future stopped; that is how I then thought of it.

At six months I lost my baby in a night of blood; it was a still-born daughter, I called her Marie. A woman who lived upstairs helped me to gather and destroy the sheets, and I buried my Marie, my hope, late at night to avoid the German patrols, in the small iron-fenced
square near St Julian de Pauvre. The moon was full, what we called a bomber's moon, so it was a dangerous burial, fraught with rush and anxiety. I remembered Lily-white singing over the body of the mummy-baby, her voice abysmal and the same moon rocking in her one liquid eye.

 

That night, on the floor above me, a whole family was taken away when the Nazis discovered a hidden wireless and a copy of
Combat
. I heard shouts and weeping sifting down through the ancient floorboards. The pitch of disaster. The tone of fear-of-death. A dropped object bang-banged as it bounced down the stairs outside my door.

(Someone in our building — I never learned who — received payment of two hundred francs for the act of denunciation.)

Outside ack-ack guns sounded and there were sirens and searchlights.

I was pouring out blood, and unable to cry.

 

It was only a month or so later when I saw a woman in an olive and peacock-feather hat throw what I thought was a baby into the Seine, and something hard within me fractured and crazed. I entered mourning by a banal process of isolation and starvation and know now that all my losses gathered together at that point. I began crying and crying and could not stop. I had not understood my own capacity for bereavement, nor uttered my long-contained distress. Waste. Dust. Rain
darkening stone walls. The sheer weight of dragged memories and grief-stricken searching. I felt ransacked, inhuman. When at last I returned to life I did not recognise myself at all; I stared into the mirror and saw darkness staring back.

For many weeks no one had called me by my name. Perhaps, in any case, I would not have answered. Perhaps this too was alienated from me, since I was vacant, and lost, and without child or country.

 

When the Liberation came one of the women who worked with me in the Italian restaurant denounced me as a collaborator. I had confided sometime earlier that my pregnancy was ‘German'. I was dragged by furious men into the street to endure public shame. My hair was shorn — rather crudely, there were nicks and bloody cuts — and I was beaten with malice about the arms and the face. Thus on Rue St Honoré, I found myself standing in a group of bruised and shorn women,
femme tondues
. We were huddled together in a kind of magnetic field, reduced to undifferentiated and anonymous symbols, the bald propitiation of national shame. An engrossed crowd circled around us, spitting and hurling abuse. The woman beside me repetitively clasped and unclasped her hands; another bit her fingernails until they bled. In this group I met again the woman Marie-Claude, the woman who had worn the olive and peacock-feather hat. At first I did not know her — since her appearance was so altered — but she embraced me
and kissed me like a long-lost sister, and she wept and declared that she was only trying to earn a living. That she was a good woman. A milliner. All the way from Brittany. And that it
was
a baby, she confessed, she had thrown that day into the Seine. A German baby, she said. A German baby. You understand.

 

When the Nazis first entered Paris, some of the residents closed their shutters or wore black arm-bands to signify mourning. I should have known what this meant. I should have understood. Disaster begins with a few oblique and isolate signs, which gather and elucidate.

In the London Underground
Anna sees it: trains resembling strips of film. They slide past her in a string of fluorescent squares, speeding vision in lit sequences to a kind of profane illumination. Trains hurtle at the darkness and disappear with a roar. They bear, she reflects, a truly lovely transience. And when sparks arise in a spray at a curve on the line, Anna experiences a flash of genuine excitement. She knows she is now seeing as Victoria Morrell sees — this fleeting dazzlement, this random white flicker of ordinary time.

 

Anna ascends from the Underground, striding two steps at once. Filtered light from a sky that threatens rain touches her head, and slides down the length of her body as she emerges into the street. Her heart is pounding. She looks up at the sky in time to catch the crossed arc of two swallows, diving swiftly, neatly, in opposite directions.

Auspice
, she thinks.
Divination through bird flight
.

The birds swoop and swerve as Anna once did. When she could fly. When she was a small flying child. The city air smells densely of petrol and rust, a fuming bus strains past, a bicycle, a taxi; but her heart is light and her spirits air-high. Just as she was taught by Uncle Ernie to apprehend visions, now, at the closing of an old woman's life, as Victoria talks her way rather elaborately towards the admission of death, Anna looks for omens of redemption and patterns within flight. Sometimes she wishes she were Christian: it would be so much easier, this whole business of symbols.

A child walks towards her, dragged by his mother. His three- or four-year-old face is flaring with pleasure; he drags a simple wooden duck which bobs and clacks as it moves. Anna catches his eye.

Nice duck! she offers.

Charlie, the boy responds, with a kind of scholarly gravity. His name is Charlie.

Pleased to meet you, Charlie. Have a wet day.

The mother looks up and smiles directly, as if they share a sly secret, and Anna crosses the road, unmoored now from the search-for-deeper-meanings, content with the child, and the smile, and the absence of rain. Momentarily she can forget that Victoria is leaving her. Victoria, whose life she daily sifts and examines and tries to render intelligible, Victoria who finds coherence only in what is no longer there, Victoria whom she adores and now suspects might be her grandmother. Uncle Ernie went to the city and
returned with a baby; it is not impossible to imagine that he had retrieved Victoria's child. Anna clings to this hypothesis because it refuses sovereignty to loss. She is waiting for the right moment. The return of Odysseus. The birthmark. The truthful unveiling. In the diastolic and systolic spaces of Victoria's life, all these openings and closings of detail and event, all this materialising and dematerialising of things moving, so unpredictably, in and out of being, she will halt the procession of images and say simply:
I am here.
She will lean her cheek against the old woman's beautifully creased face and say:
I am here, I am yours, I am evidence of the return of vanished things.

The sky has bright grey dimensions, like laterite. And crossing the street Anna is aware of unAustralian cold at her cheeks; she experiences stinging exhilaration; as if it were a kiss.

 

At Mrs Dooley's boarding house the front door is ajar. A wedge of something wrong. Anna pushes gingerly at the door, and can hear from inside a voice elevated in anger and recrimination. Winston is there, in the kitchen, standing with his back to the fireplace and his hands joined behind him, and Mrs Dooley stands before him, red-faced and shouting. When Anna enters the kitchen Mrs Dooley turns, swinging in a semi-circle to face and accuse her.

So here she is then, Lady Muck herself, fuckin' whore more like, call yourself white as driven snow and a book-learning lady, fuckin' black men like there was no
tomorrow; and me a widow and all alone, with no one but my nephew in Australia, who could be dead, for all I know, with his girl-crazy ways and his arty hands and his eyes as would melt any miser's heart, and he was such a lovely kid, all gooey smiles and what-not, but he wouldn't look, he's a gentleman, wouldn't look twice at a tart like you, a fancy lady who sleeps with black men, right under my nose, in a respectable house, what's more, and comes and goes all lah-di-dah with her papers and her pencils and her fancy-arty reproductions.

Mrs Dooley pauses for a break, then begins to cry.

A crying woman. Another woman shattered by the bombshell of what is hidden inside.

She slumps into a kitchen chair and puts her rough elbows on the table.

Sorry, sorry, me love, that was a bit rough, wasn't it? It's just that I was saving you, like. For my nephew in Australia. You'd make such a lovely couple.

Winston appears ashamed. He looks down at his shoes.

I'll make some tea, Anna suggests.

And in the spirit of tentative reconciliation, she bustles around the kitchen, opening the Persian-looking tea-caddy, washing the fine-china teapot, measuring equal-sized teaspoons, one by one, and hears herself saying, there, there, now; calm yourself, to the woman who has newly and flamboyantly abused her. Mrs Dooley is still sobbing, and it occurs to Anna that she too is distressed by mutability; she resents what her own history has taken away from her.

When Mrs Dooley drinks, it is in the manner of Uncle Ernie: she pours tea into the saucer, blows on it gently, and sips. The saucer tilts to her face. She bends her grey head. It is over five years now since Uncle Ernie's death, but Anna is still susceptible to the pangs this homely gesture elicits: Ernie's face, like a mirage, behind vertical ripples of steam.

And pardon my French, Mrs Dooley adds.

She takes a large handkerchief and blows her nose loudly, then resumes her tired invertebrate slump.

I got myself carried away a bit there.

Winston leaves to pack his things, and Anna longs to follow. But instead she sits with her arm around poor Mrs Dooley, a middle-aged woman fizzing and spluttering at the tail-end of her fury, a woman seized by something unnameable that has left her stranded in anger. In this over-heated kitchen, with the mineral sky gone, and the boy with his duck, and the air of reaching a surface in resolution, there is only frayed discomposure and bleary forms of grief. Anna suppresses weeping: she is not a woman-who-cries. In fact she never cries. Yet this seems to her entirely sad — that the joy of ascending into light is so swiftly eclipsed.

There, there, she repeats. Calm yourself, now.

And she thinks of Winston's expression, wondering what Mrs Dooley said to him before she arrived.

 

She had gone to surprise him at the library and found him not reading, after all, not caught in that virtuous
librarian quiet, composed of soft low murmurings and flipping pages, but gazing at a photograph and talking to himself. In one of those gestures of lover's licence she approached him quietly from behind and cupped her white hands over his distracted black eyes, asking him, since this was the game, to guess who? Guess who?

When he dropped the photograph, startled, she quickly retrieved it.

It was a picture of a Jamaican woman and a small happy boy. They had brilliant smiles and faced the camera with an aspect of jubilation, as though offering up to the photographer their hearts and souls. Behind their heads was a hibiscus, massed with huge yellow blooms: trumpeting love.

My wife and my son. Back in Kingston. Jamaica.

You will return to them? she asked.

But of course, no question.

(Stay, she says silently. Stay. Stay.)

They had talked together for only fifteen minutes, each reaching across the rent distance that had opened between them, and then she left. She was a woman in love with a man whose image she bore away, reversed into false whiteness, held in frail promise, as the imperishable negative of some photograph not yet developed.

She had wanted to say
stay —
her mouth close to his ear, breathing amorously, confidentially, into the warm spaces of his body — but simply could not. He had already left her.

So will he return to them? asked Victoria.

Yes, said Anna. At the end of this year.

You didn't guess?

I didn't guess about the child; I only discovered that recently. But from the beginning he had told me he was a married man.

And is she beautiful, this bride?

Yes, she is beautiful. She has — they both have — the most remarkable smiles. Their smiles make me feel pinched, mean and small. My great uncle, back home, used to say that there was something called a death-defying smile. That's what they both have. Death-defying smiles.

Victoria refilled the brandy and offered more chocolate.

I had a black man once. Played the trombone.

And did he, Anna asked, have a death-defying smile?

He was from Detroit and had wonderful fingers. I liked the shape of his head, his cheeks puffing out as he blew. It didn't last very long.

They smile at each other.

I'm sorry, said Victoria. I was sweet on him myself. Don't go crazy, she adds.

Victoria pulls up the blanket and re-balances her brandy. Anna regards her with reverent and grand-daughterly tenderness.

I won't, she responds.

 

Once they had come in from a wet Sunday and wanted only to go to bed. They undressed with inelegant
haste, flinging their clothes on the floor and wiping their naked skins on the candlewick coverlet. As they leapt beneath the blankets Winston and Anna shivered and laughed. Their hands and their feet were so cold each was obliged to perform on the other a comical ceremony of rubbing and vigorous embrace.

There, said Winston, as he placed her cold fingers between his thighs. Warm parts. The equator.

After they made love Anna realised that her face was burning. She laid her hot cheek against his pulsing neck. She wanted again to whisper
stay
, but the word fell somewhere silent, smothered in the soft intermittences of his breathing.

 

There are times when the gravity of what cannot be spoken between lovers necessitates wandering and evasive digressions. They looked into each other's faces in the wavering and water-marked light and what they spoke of was rain:

Where I come from, said Anna, we have under ten inches a year. Desert country. Dust. In the early days miners were so desperate for water they forced Aborigines to eat salt and then lead them to waterholes. One set up dynamite traps at waterholes just to kill off Aborigines.

Jesus, said Winston.

When I was twelve years old, Anna went on, there was a map in my classroom which showed Australia colour-coded according to rainfall. There were bands of rich dark green in the southern corners, bands of
light green and a wider, more pronounced band of yellow, and in the interior a huge pool of orangey-red. We lived inside the space of orangey-red. Somehow I believed that this was what Australia looked like, banded like that, a kind of stripey pattern. I was pleased to live inside the largest and most vivid space. At the sealed and cogent centre, not stretching in a narrow band. I remember once the teacher pointed at the red pool with the tip of her ruler: the Heart, she announced. The Dead Heart of Australia.

It was an alarming notion.

Winston smiled.

Dead Heart, he repeated. Are all Australians so melodramatic?

Yes, Anna said, hoping to provoke him. We are all melodramatic. Victoria and me: we are typical.

Where I come from, Winston added, it was a dark green centre. A green heart, you might say. The rain was dense and substantial — not this vapid English drizzle — and after downpours everything was glossy and scented. There were small lakes across the ground and channels between the cane rows, and there were fallen battered blossoms and sodden leaves. We children would shake the trees so that we could make our own showers and then rats came out and together we chased them. It was a kind of celebration — not this miserable drizzle. My mother would catch rainwater in her hands and then wash her face with it. I'm not sure why. A habit, I suppose, or some kind of custom. But rain meant that: her shining face.

You're a poet, said Anna.

I'm Jamaican, said Winston.

Jamaican Shakespearian.

No, Shakespearian Jamaican.

They paused, each reflective. Their lovemaking was often like this: confession, intermission.

Once, when I was seven, Anna continued, I saw a black cat spun in the air, way up high, flying anti-clockwise. Just outside the window of my school. There it was, magically spinning.

You're making that up.

No, not at all. Cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die.

Winston rolled over Anna and kissed her above the heart.

Anti-clockwise, he said gently, hovering above her.

Later that night Winston leant close to Anna's face.

Me can' sleep, he said softly, in his boyhood speech. Me keep thinkin bout all them po thirsty Aborigines …

 

It is 2 a.m. She can hear the distant forlorn sound of a revving-up vehicle.