Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  PRAISE FOR NICOLAS ROTHWELL

  ‘A caster of spells.’

  Australian Book Review

  ‘Masterful and unforgettable.’

  Pico Iyer

  ‘Rothwell’s calm wondering…left me with

  a feeling of enchantment.’

  Robert Dessaix

  ‘As moving and eloquent and imaginative…

  as contemporary writing can be.’

  Peter Craven

  Nicolas Rothwell was educated in European schools before becoming a foreign correspondent. He is the award-winning author of Heaven and Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He lives in Darwin.

  nicolasrothwell.com

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Nicolas Rothwell 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2013 by The Text Publishing Company

  Cover and page design by WH Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Cover image: Belomor Thoughts (Crisis), by Helgy Karpenko, 2012 Frontispiece: The Belomor Channel, by Alexander Rodchenko, 1933; supplied by Art Sensus, London, with thanks to Tosca Fund

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Rothwell, Nicolas.

  Title: Belomor / by Nicolas Rothwell.

  ISBN: 9781922079749 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921961953 (ebook)

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  In memory of

  Tjinawima Napaltjarri

  ‘Vidi ego odorati victura rosaria Paesti

  sub matutino cocta iacere Noto.’

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Praise

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I BELOMORKANAL

  II MURATTI AMBASSADOR

  III WINFIELD BLUE

  IV MINGKURLPA

  I

  BELOMORKANAL

  EARLY IN THE SUMMER of 1747, as soon as the Alpine passes had begun to clear, the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto set out on a journey northwards from his home, travelling for several weeks, through settled Hapsburg lands and wild, picturesque valleys, until he reached the capital of the kings of Saxony—Dresden, on the banks of the river Elbe.

  The city, with its spires and gleaming monuments, was famous at that time throughout Europe for its elegance and splendour: the sight of the imperial palaces and churches, seen from across the wide, smooth-flowing river on certain summer days, when the light was at its loveliest and most golden, called to mind the grand views of Italian cities then much in vogue at princely courts—and this was the reason for Bellotto’s journey. He was known already for his ability to record a scene, and capture its finest details: much like his uncle Giovanni Antonio Canal, whose gifts he seemed to have concentrated and refined in the minute grain of his own canvases, Bellotto could survey and set down a teeming urban spectacle, singling out its individual features and recomposing them with such harmony the resultant image had the look of a natural, inevitable pattern. Yet his painted cityscapes were chill and solemn where Canaletto’s had a warmth and gauzy softness: in his brushstrokes, for all their finesse and painstaking precision, there was a tone quite absent from the works of his more celebrated master; he reached beyond the mere description of the components of a landscape; he seemed inclined almost to pass judgement on the worlds he delineated with such exactitude; he was in love with fate, and mutability—and these characteristics made him the ideal artist for the court on the river Elbe. For the region of Saxony was unstable in those days; its future was uncertain—it had been convulsed by the military campaigns, skirmishes and power struggles that were near constant throughout Central Europe in the century’s first decades. Its air of well-founded solidity was deceptive: the majesty of its new buildings had come at a cost, in guns and men; they bore the stamp of its ruler, Augustus the Strong; they were his artifice, the product of his stern, unbending will. Bellotto had been summoned to record the dream of an autocrat, a dream turned into light and stone. That royal Dresden soon became known as Florence on the Elbe—writers and scholars from the nearby cities of Bohemia and Moravia would come to wonder at its beauties, and imagine that they stood amid pavilions of Quattrocento grandeur. But the true model for the king had been Venice: elusive, potent Venice—the Venice of views, the Venice reflected in lagoon waters, which Bellotto, who would never again see his own homeland, now set about recreating in the cold perfection of his paint.

  There is no doubting the gifts of the young artist: even his earliest scenes of Dresden are resolved, and their ornateness has a terrifying edge. The groups of figures scurry like ants, oblivious of the great forces shaping their environment. The squares and public spaces dwarf them, the façades of palaces and the church elevations rise like tombs above them.

  These disquieting qualities in Bellotto’s work have gone largely unremarked in our time because of a circumstance that the artist himself could not have foreseen. His reputation grew; he travelled widely between the court cities of the Saxon kingdom. The sweeping panoramic views he made during the last years of his life were painted in Warsaw, where he worked for another ruler with an eye to posterity, who commissioned another series of grand vistas, designed to hang in the royal castle. This idyllic Warsaw, rich in parks and fountains, was destroyed, down to the last building, in the course of World War II: the post-war communist regime, in need of some grand project that might absorb Polish nationalist sentiments, decided to rebuild the capital in the image of the old city, stone by stone, brick by brick. Bellotto’s paintings were the only systematic blueprint. They became the model, and secured him a late-dawning international fame: for the documentary precision of his work, which derived from his relentless use of a camera obscura to guide his hand, allowed the specialist teams of labourers and architects charged with the reconstruction of Warsaw to build a city in his image, and the recreated avenues and palaces of the Polish capital retain in their aspect to this day something of Bellotto’s own cool temperament.

  He could not have known. And yet, in some sense, he already knew: and knew very well. There is a famous painting of his, The Ruins of the Former Kreuzkirche—it exists in a pair of versions: one in Dresden; one, the more beautiful, in Zurich, in the incongruous setting of the modernist Kunsthaus, where I often used to see it during my schooldays. I can feel even now the thrill of horror it awoke in me when I set eyes on it for the first time. The canvas depicts the remains of a Dresden landmark, largely destroyed during the bombardment of the city by Prussian troops. The church tower dominates the image, though it is set slightly off-centre, to the left. Rubble spills from the main structure: beams of timber, masonry, dust. Intense activity fills the square before the ruined edifice, though whether it is a story of rebuilding or clearing remains, at first glance, quite uncertain: either task amounts, in the fullness of time, to the same thing. Crowds of onlookers survey the spectacle: dignitaries, society ladies, a pair of lovers. The surrounding palaces stand untouched—how inscrutable those powers are that decide where the projectiles fall. The sky is almost clear: a soft, pinkish light is in the clouds. Tiny figures can be made out, standing just beneath the damaged tower�
��s pinnacle, almost on the same level as a stone saint. The entire inner structure of the church is exposed to view: its stairwells and galleries, its vaults and buttressings—the whole hidden wonder of its engineering stripped bare, much like the convolutions of a half-eroded seashell tossed up on a sandy shore.

  *

  Of all the monuments of Dresden, there was a single one to which Bellotto was drawn back repeatedly: the flamboyant church of Our Lady, the high-domed Frauenkirche, which he painted and sketched, from varying angles, in varying lights, and which the modern generation knew for many years only from these painted recollections. As one stares into those elusive works of his—they hang, for the most part, still, in the city where they were made—one can sense the artist’s careful eye, transposing the impressions before him into a style of permanence. How did he decide to give the team of white carriage horses in the forefront of this vista such a springing step? What made him set down in his brushstrokes two dogs at play at the edge of a cloud shadow, one leaping up above its companion, front legs outstretched? Each view snatches the breath of the moment, the rushing race of life; each is a memorial, drenched by the painter’s awareness that nothing he sees and makes fixed will ever be fixed, or come again. In every one of these canvases, the eye is drawn by the dome of the Frauenkirche, which Bellotto knew in minute detail: the scars and discolorations on the curved stone flanks can be traced in his different renditions; they are consistent; the artist is proclaiming the complete absence of fantasy from these works. Here is that great stone bell seen from the Moritzstrasse; here it is from the angle of the Judenhof, in different light. The sky, though, is always tinged by a faint quality of haze, which lends the image field a veiled aspect; and, try as one might, the eye cannot strip this filtering away. The figures—they are clear; more than clear, they are distinct from far off, the painted view is accurate far beyond the point where a human gaze would blur and fail: the red court coats beneath the distant palace arcade, the individual spokes on the coach wheels at the picture’s vanishing point, the pale shadows cast by tiny cornices and columns—they are all present, rendered in a detail so sharp they hinder the mind’s capacity to see. And who are those workmen, their lithe silhouettes picked out by the sunlight on the roof of the Frauenkirche, where the façade leans up towards the dome’s fringing balustrade? Three together, and a fourth, close by, bent over, engaged in some elaborate task of repair. This, too, we may be sure, is historical—for the church was always an uncertain building, weakened by the overload of its vast superstructure pressing upon its slender piers. It was, in fact, an ambiguity in every sense: a Lutheran church in a Catholicruled city; a cathedral dedicated to the Virgin, whose name it bore, though she was wholly absent from its decorative program; a grand Venetian cupola, made from sandstone instead of marble, and rising not from the lagoon beside the Doge’s steps, but over the lush water meadows of the Elbe.

  By good fortune, an account survives of the Frauenkirche as it seemed in its time of greatest glory, just after the last battles of the Seven Years’ War, when the dome stood proud and high over the half-ruined city. Charles Burney, the eighteenth-century British musician-traveller, records in some detail in his two-volume German Tour the impression Dresden made on him after his long journey upriver through the rough, romantic Erzgebirge. ‘The city itself has suffered so much that it is difficult for a stranger to imagine himself near the celebrated capital of Saxony, even when he sees it from the most favourable eminence in the neighbourhood, so few of its once many cloud-capt towers are left standing.’ The prevailing tone was one of oppressive melancholy: ‘From being the seat of the Muses, and habitation of pleasure, it is now only a dwelling for beggary, theft and wretchedness.’ Even the opera Burney saw performed at the little Kurfuerstliches theatre left him quite indifferent, though he did note the musical gifts of the street gangs of ‘singing boys’ who hired themselves out for funerals. The sole distinctive feature of his visit was the church, ‘a very noble and elegant building, of white stone, with a high dome in the middle’. It was now the emblem of the city; it had been proof against every attack: the cannonballs and artillery shells aimed at it had rebounded harmlessly from the great stone vaulting’s ‘orbicular form’. The service Burney attended there filled him with strong emotion, so fine was the singing, ‘some three thousand persons, one of the grandest choruses I ever heard’. And it is true that the great church, in its first incarnation, was often regarded as an intimate religious space, despite its overwhelming scale: the preacher’s pulpit jutted out towards the congregation pews; the eyes of all those seated in the high surrounding galleries were concentrated on the altar, and on its sculpted group—a vivid treatment, in the round, in the most advanced manner of the day: Christ kneeling in the garden of Gethsemane, an angel appearing to him from the heavens, overhead the eye of God, imperturbable, staring from a knot of cherub-infested stucco cloud. It was an illustration of the central place in life of silent prayer; it also highlighted the strange receptiveness of the divine to suffering—that specialty of the region, as characteristic as the crossed-swords trademark on the court’s much-prized porcelain.

  *

  A few decades more, and the city was destroyed anew. This time the torment and loss of life was great. Technology had advanced: the explosives unleashed upon Dresden on the night of February fourteenth, 1945 produced sounds and spectacles not familiar before then in mankind’s rich experience of siege and war. Much of the city’s centre was liquefied by the heat of the explosions rained down on it, and the resultant firestorms. The air itself became a cause of death, for oxygen from the atmosphere was sucked into the flames: men and women fleeing from the destruction fell, asphyxiated, to the burning rubble at their feet, or died huddled in their shelters; the bodies discovered in those havens were cremated by flamethrower, for want of graves or gravediggers after the event. The bombing has been described, and picked over in great detail, from both strategic and moral viewpoints; the testimony of survivors has been printed and used for propaganda; indeed, the city and its fate were a cause, more than a place, all through the post-war decades: its name became a byword not for beauty but for the beauties that had once been there. The accounts of the bombing, though, all fell short of the scenes they related: what style would fit, what authorial presence seem appropriate? Those who wrote from experience were both too close and too far away from their memories; those who imagined themselves into the streets and houses of the city as the bomber fleets approached were too inclined to seek out the higher meanings embedded in the sequence of impacts and consequences.

  But by chance there was a well-placed witness, familiar with the task of level, meticulous narration, who survived that fiery night in the city, reached safety and set down at once a detailed relation of all that he had seen. This witness, a professor of romance literature named Viktor Klemperer, who was already sixty-three years old on the night of the firestorm, stood in a strange relationship to the destruction: he was of Jewish descent, and he had endured the unending humiliations heaped upon him by the Third Reich until that time, and recorded them in a series of clandestine diaries. Klemperer had recently learned that he was at last bound for deportation, together with the few remaining members of the local Jewish community, all of whom, like him, had been spared until then only because of their marriages to Aryan partners. Klemperer was still absorbing this news, turning it over in uneasy fashion in his thoughts, still wondering what the exact nature of the ordeal awaiting him in coming days might be, when the sound of the massed engines became audible in the cold dark sky.

  There was salvation for him in the flames: ‘Whoever of the bearers of the star was spared by this night was delivered—for in the general chaos he could escape the Gestapo.’ So Klemperer wrote, in his most portentous fashion, in the book he published early in the next phase of his life: it was a formal academic study of the language of the National Socialist state, and all he permitted himself by way of personal recollection was contained in a bri
ef, snatched preface. His diaries, with their recitation of his experiences in Dresden from the fledgling days of the dictatorship through to its convulsive end—they saw the light only years after Klemperer was dead, and Germany’s division at war’s end had been undone, and the long inheritance of grief and damage was being smoothed away. They seemed then like tidings from a far-off world, and yet those who read them felt their force at once; their words were like a lash upon the skin: they preserved the texture of the moments Klemperer lived through, and lived purely to record. How unfailingly he paced his sentences to catch the ebb and flow of chance impressions. How closely he gave attention to the way time accelerates, slows down, and circles back in grand repeating cycles to overprint our thoughts.

  When he heard the first bombs of the great raid falling, as he relates, Klemperer was sure it was the most terrible attack that he had known, but this conviction quickly vanished: for more explosions came, much stronger ones, in waves, surging, forming into mingled washes of distorted sound. From the men and women in the shelter round him, when silence came to the skies, he heard only whimpers, sobs. At last, an all-clear; Klemperer struggles up: it is deep night-time still, but outside the sky is bright as day, fires burn, a fierce wind blows, broken glass in a thick glinting carpet covers the ground. More sounds of bomber engines, more detonations: Klemperer takes refuge once again, is separated from his wife, ‘Then an explosion at the window close to me. Something hard and glowing hot struck the right side of my face.’ He puts his hand up: it is covered in blood. He checks for his eye: it is still there. He runs again, and hauls with him his precious bag of manuscripts. Under cover: the vaulting of some half-destroyed cellar: bombs again, but this time he feels only exhaustion, no fear: Klemperer advances. Voices swirl. New shelter: all of them are strangers, thrown together; they are in the hall of the Reichsbank building, surrounded by soaring flames. The heat is too much: they climb, up a pathway, through the gardens; at last the terrace, high above the Elbe—the firestorm wind is blowing hard, sparks in blazing showers fly through the air. To the right and left, buildings are alight—the art academy, the Belvedere. When the showers of sparks grow too intense, Klemperer dodges from one side of the terrace to the other. Standing out like a torch on the near side of the river is a tall building, at Pirnaischer Platz, glowing white, and on the far bank, bright as day, the roof of the finance ministry in flames. Then rain comes: it is heavy—it falls for hours, as if generated by the wind and storm—the ground grows soft and sodden; the ashes on its surface are still smouldering; steam rises from it like a mist, backlit in reddish shades.