Black Mirror (20 page)

Anna thinks of Winston's hands. Of his forehead. His mouth. She is laced into the space of wherever he is and knows that when she sleeps it is the nightfall of his absence she slides into. Now, insomniac, and agonised by yearning, she wonders how she will live with this excess of desire. She is lying on her back, considering the ceiling over which streetlight flickers and plays. Discs, shafts, the swinging beam of headlights:
this spectrum of effects appears somehow like a transparent body, or indeed like the memory of such a body, evoked in fits and starts and lit in clustered flashes that signify everything vague and uncertain. She remembers the occasion of her lover carrying a cyclamen through the streets of London, all comic benignity and Shakespearian joy; he cradled it in his hands; it was mysterious, like an offering; and then she remembers the little boy with the string-along duck, the bright particular boy, so touchingly formal, so charmingly stern, and she sees this boy now, floating on the ceiling, his round face shimmering and efflorescent, and wonders for the first time in her life if she will ever have a child.

Jules is shadowy,
said Anna. I don't see him at all.

Yes, shadowy.

He had fallen asleep, Victoria said, on the velvet chaise longue.

He was on his back, with his hands knitted together at the centre of his body — as though he were older, somehow, since this is the sleeping posture of a man with a belly, a man holding himself against death, a man preparing to rest forever in the mean confinements of a coffin. Yet he was in lovely repose; his face was young and placid.

 

I closed the shutters, then gathered our four or five candles. I lit and arranged them so that the light cast Jules' silhouette in profile upon the wall, and with my box of artist's chalks traced the outline of his face and the top of his body. Thereafter the wall bore the memory of my lover — a stain was at his forehead and a
tiny crack at the cheek, but I was quietly surprised at the likeness there, its uncanny quality. I was surprised at the specificity of his face, captured like that, and surprised too by my own inclination to superstition; I felt I'd trapped him, that he was mine. When I dream of Jules he sometimes appears as a shadow. A chalky shadow with a crack on one cheek …

He had fallen asleep after a tachycardia attack. It had shocked me, his vulnerability. We had been shopping at the market on Rue Mouffetard when suddenly his whole body began swaying and jolting, his face became livid and he was gleaming with sweat. At that stage I knew nothing about Jules' heart condition, and I was alarmed to see such utter change. His knees buckled under him and our shopping spilled — clementines went bouncing down the cobbled street — and Jules gagged on what he was unable to express. Startled shoppers scrambled around us to gather our shopping, exultant at the terrible and exciting situation. A man dying, convulsively, in front of their eyes. An event-to-talk-about.
Un spectacle
.

Think of it, Anna: a seizure of the body controlled by the racing heart, a kind of perilous extravagance, an over-supply of vivacity.

When the attack was over Jules found he had wet himself.

How humiliating, he whispered in English.

He was panting against my neck; and although his body shivered, he was hot as a flame. With my silk scarf I dabbed at the sweat that flowed from him.

I remember that Jules insisted on carrying the shopping home. It was clearly a labour; he could barely make it up the stairs. When I closed the door he had dropped our basket and was already lying down, with his eyes closed and his hands resting clasped on his belly.

I'll just rest for a minute, Jules called out softly.

His fatigue was so great, his body so persecuted, that he was instantly asleep. I drew the outline then. I drew his face and body in its almost incredible stillness, settling into the immunity and suppliance of sleep. Jules called it
Cartoon of a young man's brush with Death
, and threatened to erase it, but the image remained on the wall, long after he was gone. Even now it may be there, upstairs, faintly recalling him. In Rue Gît Le Coeur.

 

What happened to Jules?

(Anna can barely bring herself to ask the question.)

Jules was lost: buried treasure … To be honest, I don't know.

 

The first large round-up of Jews in Paris was in July, 1942. Thousands were herded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the Vél d'Hiv, we called it, and then deported to camps. Jules, I believe, was not among them. He had disappeared before that; he had not worn the yellow star with
Juif
written on it. He had not carried the sign of his own fatality.

According to Hélène — who seemed so sure — he'd last been seen at Drancy, sometime late in 1943.
Drancy was a prison camp just to the north of Paris: it was a holding point before inmates were sent to Auschwitz.

Nobody knows, Hélène said bleakly, looking into the engulfing distance, looking into uncertainty, where he went after that. In her deafness and bereavement she heard only the tremendous ringing echo of his absence.

A photographer we knew in Paris told me that he heard that Jules had been working for the Resistance. Taking secret photographs, he said. Aiding the Gaullistes and the Allies with his fluency in English. But was not sure exactly where. Or when it was. Or the unit to which he had been attached. Not sure, he said.

Someone else, an old school friend, who knew of his condition, speculated that Jules had died of a heart attack.

In these dreadful times, a natural death, he said, trying hard to comfort and console me. We both knew it was a lie. But I nodded, and said yes, of course that is possible, and he touched the back of my hand in a sympathetic gesture, as though I was a widow standing in a parlour, over a walnut and brass coffin, legitimately grieving.

One of our neighbours told me that she heard Jules had escaped to the United States, through Spain and Gibraltar.

Probably a rich man in California, photographing film stars. Probably in Beverly Hills. Probably famous.

Another fake consolation. Another net to catch nothing in, thrown over tearful darkness …

 

Something grim obsesses me: O Anna, let me tell you.

In September, 1943, a group of seventy prisoners in Drancy began building an escape tunnel. They worked in shifts, day and night, for almost two months, but were discovered by the Germans with only thirty metres to go. All those involved in the escape plan were summarily executed. I think my Jules was there. I think my Jules was there in the discovered tunnel.

This is the mystery of amorous connection at work: lovers carry each other around like shadows; they trail their phantom desires; they sense as an intuitive shape the equation of the other; and they also absorb in their lovemaking the logic of each other's images. This tunnel he entered. This corridor between us. It was surrender to the darkness that I had given him.

 

You think I morbidly romanticise, my darling Anna-lytical? You think me necromantic? Perhaps I morbidly romanticise. But something in me, some limit, or some propensity, perhaps, will not allow any precise imagining of the camp. Or the precise physical circumstances of his death. Only this chute of darkness, and his face there, glowing.

When the Germans fled they destroyed all the records at Drancy. So we will never know. We will never know.

Hélène Levy was still searching for her son, Jules Levy, photographer of faces, photographer of brides, when she died, broken-hearted, in 1950. I went to her funeral. She had asked to be buried with a yellow star and her son's portrait photograph, pinned together, intimately, over her heart. Both the star and the photo graph bore the strange sheen of worn objects touched again and again.

I looked into the open coffin and saw Jules' face, young and seductive, looking back. He was sixteen years old with a boy-smile and messy hair, and he peered from his rectangle, from his pillow of star, shyly eternal.

I tore at the sleeves and the pocket of my blouse, but grief swelled and grew.

Victoria is sitting up in bed,
wearing her feathers and demanding a cocktail.

Gin fizz! she calls out. To hasten my marvellous dying! To pickle my exquisite corpse!

Beside her, on the table where the cyclamen had been, stands the antique hourglass, emptying and filling. Victoria wakes at night, at arbitrary intervals, to reach over and turn it; and even though for her it bears no timekeeping function at all, she loves the opposed brass phoenixes, each holding their glass bubbles, and the uniform fall of grain upon grain, and the two tidy pyramids, pale triangles in the night-light, diminishing and building. Such a lovely invention.

She insists too that it is a surreal object
par excellence
: what could be stranger than time configured as twin glasses, a slim communicating passage and the transit of egg-shell? She loves its slow hypnotic regularity. She loves its
déjà vu
and its iconic outline.

Cécilia is puzzled by the disappearance of her pot of flowers, but too polite to ask. She now visits twice a day because her patient's condition has deteriorated. There are good days, like today, but Victoria has made a decision — Cécilia has seen this before — that her time is nearly over. In her years of nursing, she tells Anna, this phenomenon continues to surprise her: the degree of human will entailed in death, the purposive way in which some patients greet their end, as though they are travelling towards a loving or imperative assignation. Cécilia, a woman preoccupied with murderous thoughts about her own husband, often wonders if she will end this way, with spirit and self-possession. Together Anna and Cécilia confer: Victoria is working to some schedule, announces Cécilia, some private
liaison
, some
rendezvous
.

Yes, Anna is thinking,
liaison, rendezvous
. Her mothers. Her babies. Her perished and disappeared lovers.

She has detected in herself a sort of resentment. Victoria is speeding her death, accelerating into tunnels, indifferent to the young woman, her relative, who daily tends and attends her. Arrows of story fly out and she catches them with her body. She is merely a target. She is the destination of shot energy, expended, then unimportant.

What Anna knows now of Victoria is the variety of her calamities: her life is so racked by inordinate disfigurations of grief it might all be untrue; it might all be fabrication. There are too many gravesites, located and unlocatable, and too many fragments betokening
self-magnification. These hurt Anna: both the details and her own lingering mistrust. She wants to say:
I am here, I am yours, I am evidence of the return of vanished things
, but the time is not right, Victoria is not right. She is in a labyrinth in which she hears only her own querulous voice. Victoria has entered a kind of loquacious disintegration. She chatters randomly, but with an almost demented assertiveness.

 

When Jules and I made love in the tunnel — no, that was Louis — when Louis and I made love in the tunnel, we came out with white-coloured dust all over our skin. Like ash. Like cremation. It was at once the return and foreshadowing of death. I carried death like a disease, like irradiation, from lover to lover …

 

Do you know what Nabokov said of Salvador Dali? That he was Norman Rockwell's lost evil twin, wreaking vengeance on the world with bucket loads of shit. Or was it bucket loads of kitsch? I despised him, Salvador Dali. That flabby world he inhabited. That moral deliquescence —

He gave me a snakeskin, once, a shed skin, which he had discovered somewhere outside our tunnel. It was covered in brown patterns of diamonds and exquisitely light, like web. He hung it around my neck as a lover's garland. Later I pinned it to
the back of my bedroom door, but Henry tore it to pieces. Because it was mine. Because it was special.

 

Something terrible. A woman in my building returned; she had survived the camps. Her head was shorn, like mine, and she looked only half alive. A group of men at our local bar assumed she was a collaborator and spat at her and abused her. Afterwards they apologised, their caps in their hands, their heads bowed in shame. She left for Australia. ‘It is the furthest place I can think of,' she said. ‘The end of the earth.'

 

Romance makes women histrionic. This is its chief virtue, to theatricalise desire. The lover is disponsibilité: ready for the marvellous.

‘I am the man with sea urchin lashes who for the first time raises his eyes on the woman who must be everything for him, in the blue streets.'
André Breton, 1937. A beautiful line, don't you think?

 

I carried death like a disease, like irradiation, from lover to lover. I left tell-tale hand prints all over their bodies.

 

The lights of Montmartre were glass beads to guide me. I wore my feathers and a lapis gown of watered silk. Breton looked down like Odilon Redon's eye-in-a-balloon, and I realised I was afraid of him. (Float away, float away.)

 

I always wanted to go to Melbourne, the Capital of Sorrow … Mel-bourne, spell-borne … I never made it, you know. I never saw what the sound was.

I dream of Jules as a shadow, but I also dream him bright, outlined very sharply and with unusual definition. There is a technique in photography called solarisation, in which a partially developed print is exposed to light, so that black-and-white images emerge with heavy black borders, and their planes and their details seem luminous and unearthly. He was a solarised being; oddly exposed. The surfaces of his skin were bright and incendiary.

I looked into the mirror and darkness looked back.

 

The surfaces of his skin were bright and incendiary.

 

In the British Museum, many years after the war, I rested my face against a mummy case, to check for a heartbeat.

‘I've dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken

and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more is left me

than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow

than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk

on the sundial of your life.'

Robert Desnos:
I've dreamed of you so much. I know the whole poem. Shall I complete the recitation?

 

Where is Ruby?

Where is Lily-white?

Where is the flame tree?