Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Notions of this kind plaguing him, his great writings done, Winckelmann felt the temptation to see once more the homeland of his youthful sufferings. In truth, he was lost in life: he had no idea which way to go. He had received offers: from Berlin, from Dessau, from other German courts of learning where the friends of his letters held posts. He set off in April 1768, across the Alps, on the same path Bellotto had traced out two decades earlier. He reached Vienna; he was received in audience there by the empress, and decorated with a range of imperial honours, in recognition of his scholarship. Some intuition stopped him: he decided there could be no return to his own country; he turned back; the journey brought him to the Adriatic coastline, to Trieste, and there, on the night of June eighth, in the hotel where he had found lodgings, he was stabbed to death. His assailant was Francesco Arcangeli, a chancer and petty thief, who had thought Winckelmann an individual of no account. The murder was documented in vast detail by a pair of local investigators; the resultant book, translated, became a bestseller: it added a frisson of dark glamour to Winckelmann’s fast-growing fame. How torn he had been in his last months; how low in spirits; how far from life. There had been true friends waiting for him over the mountains: there had been warmth of feeling, admiration too; but he drew back. He was caught in the temple of his self-made isolation—and there is a sublime match between the man and the tomb in the graveyard of Trieste’s San Giusto cathedral, where his remains lie in a neoclassical vault, set apart, immured in a sarcophagus of gleaming Istrian marble with a grief-struck angel perched at its head. He had dreamed of leaving the world just as he entered it, a light-footed traveller: this dream, at least, was fulfilled.

  *

  The museum’s doors were closing. The birthday event was long since done. Filled with solemn ideas and wild forebodings, lifted up, cast down, ancient ruins in my eyes, mind and heart both racing, I stepped out into the cold damp air. I drove, and as the kilometres flicked by I brought the story into focus in my thoughts: its reversals, its rhythms, its echoes—echoes of Armin’s story, the Easterner, the pilgrim, condemned by being freed; of Specht, spinning dreams in his remembered desert—threads of stories, crossing each other, repeating, the whole world bound up in them and their interweavings; and I too, looking, retracing steps, chasing intuitions through landscapes I had once known, or imagined that I knew—all changed now. I made my way down the well-kept back roads to the destination I had chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, for that night’s hotel—Halberstadt, the town at the end of the film-maker’s tale, the town of rebuilt spires and destroyed munitions plants.

  I arrived: it was the chill late afternoon. The smell of diesel and factory smoke was in the air. Before me was a market scene: stalls closing, vans loading, men and women farewelling each other with signs of deep affection, going their different ways. A handful of figures were headed past the low-slung housing blocks towards the older quarter of the town. I followed, through squares, and parks, taking in the streets and houses, the old and new orders thrown against each other. There was a crowd converging on a stone building straight ahead. Over its arched entrance a large banner in the style of a heraldic flag had been hung down: its edges were lifting and fluttering in the gusts of the breeze: ‘As Slow As Possible’, it announced—and indeed, the members of the crowd were moving slowly, in a formal, stately fashion, as if enacting the words inscribed above their heads. One by one they filed into the building, checking their watches as they went. A camera crew was filming this ceremony; a knot of dignitaries stood by. Inside, a vaulted, arcaded nave; the shell of a church, stripped of its decoration; at one end, a wooden platform, angular, symmetric, bearing tall organ pipes on both sides. Onlookers were gathered before this assemblage, from which a low, constant note was coming: a sound wave, more than a note, oddly piercing, unvarying for minutes on end—and this apparatus seemed to hold the little congregation bunched up before it quite mesmerised; they were silent; they gazed upwards with wide, marvelling eyes. Beside me was a man with a lined face, in coat and scarf.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ I whispered to him.

  He wheeled around.

  ‘You don’t know? Really?’

  ‘No idea.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Well, I suppose that only makes things that much more perfect,’ he said: ‘Today’s the day. That’s the power chance holds in the work’s design. There’s never pure coincidence, though, is there? Absolute coincidence?’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘No—I doubt it—I see affinities everywhere, connections: hidden ones. You: what brought you? Have you ever thought seriously about time? What it is, what kind of stuff it is, how it passes, its velocity? Ever thought about its flow? Ever wanted to slow it down?’

  ‘I think of little else,’ I said.

  At which a young woman, elegantly dressed, with a hard, set expression, came towards us. ‘Klemens, stop talking: it’s a serious moment; it’s close at hand.’

  ‘What’s close at hand?’ I broke in.

  ‘You don’t know? You’re here by chance? How beautiful.’

  She smiled a dazzling smile; she shook my hand.

  ‘It’s art,’ she said: ‘Our new religion. Art in a broad frame, of course—art reconceived.’

  She hurried on; she fixed her gaze on me, and gave me a low, half-whispered explanation. Halberstadt was the scene of a great cultural experiment: it was a laboratory of new ways of being, new ways of thinking.

  ‘You surely know the name of the composer John Cage,’ she went on, her voice dropping even lower, until she was speaking almost solely with her lips, and signalling, rather than speaking her words, over which the organ note could be clearly made out.

  ‘I don’t remember him being a big cultural reference point in the old East Germany,’ I answered.

  ‘Those days are over,’ said she, with an air of vexation: ‘Long gone. No one remembers them: no one pays that past attention any more. New times, new thoughts—and there’s a performance of a work of John Cage here, under way in this space, right now.’

  ‘That unchanging note?’

  ‘It’s not an unbroken single note, even if sounds like one—it’s part of a continuing performance event. The idea came from the millennium: the year 2000. That was precisely 639 years since the first modern organ was built, here in Halberstadt—and this piece itself will take as many years to complete. In its first form, it was a brief composition—its length was measured only in minutes; the score was no more than eight pages long—so when it’s performed in this way, spaced out so, with this signature in time, the notes played by the organ change only very rarely, and on the occasions when a new sound is due to be born, people gather, to mark the moment, and measure out an interval in their own experience of life.’

  ‘And this is such a moment?’

  ‘Exactly—now—there are only minutes left before it comes. People have been waiting a long time. The last change was more than two years in the past.’

  ‘Slow going!’

  ‘Don’t mock,’ she said, and she gave me a defiant stare: ‘There were plenty of mockers in Halberstadt, when the piece began. There was nothing much here back then to treat as special, nothing to care about. No dreams; no longings. And now we have this: we have pattern inside time. Sculpture inside time. Movement; stillness; grace. Can’t you imagine what it brings, when time’s flow is made visible to you; when it’s slowed down in this way, so you can truly grasp how sweet and precious each second in its passing is? I’m not the only one who feels great revelations have been given to me in this old building, listening over stretches of time to the sound of the single note—and when the change comes, it’s like the moment when you first set eyes on someone you love: when what you’ve longed for is given to you; when visions become truth. When everything—past, present and future—stands in a clear pattern in your mind. Now, listen!’

  There was a motion at the front of the crowd. The note changed; a new chord came. It persisted; it fill
ed the vaulted space above us; it was as if it had always been there—regal, complete in itself. There was a murmur of appreciation: a soft noise, delicate; the members of the crowd looked around, a gentle air about them. Several minutes passed before they began to move, and speak, and filter out into the half-light of the square. One by one they went: men, women, the younger, the older; but wait—that figure, tall, dark-coated, with silver hair and a slight hunch to the shoulders. Who was it? The bearing was familiar. The heavy entrance door swung closed behind that form, more fleeting shape than solid man.

  I stared: the seconds passed. There was some resemblance working at the edge of my memory, I was sure of it. The airy sense of freedom that comes in a place of strangers had a hold of me: that freedom that comes when only whims and stray thoughts can spur one on. I would go outside, and if I still could see that figure, then I would follow, pursue, overhaul him, look into his face—but even as I was making this decision, inside myself I knew: it was nothing, it would be nothing; life’s joins are never where you think; it was a trick of light, no more. Out I went, into the flagstoned square under the cold sky, and glanced about—towards the new town; towards the parklands, where the road sloped down—there were children, couples walking: no one.

  Then I saw him, already at a distance, beneath the last street light before the black shade thrown by the cathedral façade. He was striding away with fast steps. I gave chase. I ran. The figure swept into the cathedral. I too, and gazed up and down. The nave was dimly lit: its white stone gleamed like opals. A door banged shut: a side door—it led into the cloister. What desolation I found there: damaged tombs, crumbling stonework, roped-off sections of the arcading under repair, a garden overgrown, pale lights casting a thin glow through the murk. I walked those cloisters: the entire circuit. Empty. But still I could feel someone: a presence. I wheeled round, and in that half-second it seemed to me I caught a glimpse of a patch of movement. I went towards it. And there, beside a carved column, half-hidden, staring out, jaw clenched, just as he had stared out across the Dresden ruins twenty years before, was Stefan Haffner.

  ‘So,’ I said, lifted up by an absurd sense of fulfilment: ‘It was you.’

  How little changed he was. He was still tall and gaunt; his face still had an imperious air about it, his eyes blazed with a fierce alertness, there was the same bitter, anguished twist to the lines around his mouth.

  ‘It was you,’ I said again: ‘Do you remember me? I’ve looked for you. I tried to find your traces.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I wanted to tell you: how much that talk meant to me; that talk, all those years ago, when we made a visit to your apartment, in Dresden, in the pitch of night, in the old regime days, when I was covering the East, and we had no idea what the future held. I felt it, even then: that was a night when patterns formed for me. I’ve been living in it ever since. I’ve longed to see you again, professor, to be able to tell you.’

  He surveyed me, and sequences of emotions seemed to pass across his face. Scorn, fury, a soft, pitying pondering: then resignation. He looked up at the sky, now almost black, with the haze of smoke and fumes hiding any traces of light from the moon or stars.

  ‘To each his own,’ he said, coldly. ‘Everyone’s longing for something.’

  And that was all he said. My thoughts jumped back. They flew through the years, to the day we met. I saw him looking at me. I saw my younger self in his eyes. I saw: what? Vanity, presumption, pride—all the things one sloughs off in life, and then forgets.

  ‘How much I learned from you then, professor,’ I said, softly, almost breathing out the words: ‘How much!’

  ‘About really existing socialism,’ he shot back, in a low, harsh voice: ‘I had no insights. You had no need of instruction from me.’

  ‘No,’ I said: ‘Not that. Of course not. About the other things. I still remember every word you told me: about the journey you made to the north, and the ideas that trip set in movement in your mind; and all those pictures and images resonated with me—deeply.’

  ‘Images?’

  ‘The light melting on the waves of the White Sea; the sense you had then of the way light shimmers, and dissolves; just the way you said it then: you see beyond the contours of the world, you stare through and escape yourself.’

  He stared at me as if peering into a dream.

  ‘And you’ve been looking for that light? Seeing it? Borrowing someone else’s emotions. What a path in life!’

  ‘It’s like the closing of a circle for me,’ I said: ‘Seeing you again.’

  I watched his face, and I was aware of doing so, in anxiety, as if I was looking for some sign there, some token, and there was some belief in me that we can reach back towards the past, down pathways through used up time.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said: ‘But I scarcely remember those days you’re speaking of.’ He smiled, at this, almost triumphantly. ‘If I remember you at all, you’re like a ghost to me.’

  I absorbed this remark. I felt a nameless wound inside myself.

  ‘Of course,’ I said: ‘I understand. Many things have happened.’

  ‘Changes! That whole world has gone, and all the feelings and ideas it made a home for. People disappear from you, and from your thoughts. They go like smoke.’ He screwed up his face, as if what he was saying caused him great pain. ‘You want to see patterns; you want to find them. And sometimes there are patterns. Sometimes we do remember, and see life’s shape, but the structures that we build—they fail to hold, to crystallise: we lose them. I picture us all, in the course of our lives, like so many dust particles, pouring out of a factory chimney stack—pouring constantly out.’

  He reached into his coat pocket, then stopped, as if struck, seized by something, almost against his wishes. He looked up.

  ‘What brought you here?’ he said, suspiciously: ‘That note change in the organ piece? Are you some kind of music lover?’

  What had? A chain of leads. Hints; cues; the need to hear chance when it calls; find links: follow them. Annihilate one’s will, the better to assert it. See the core of things.

  I tried to sketch this out before him: how life had turned, and swung for me, and led me there; the cascade of events, the leans and shifts that steered me on my way. I traced out the line, in all its details.

  ‘As strange,’ I said, ‘as the path that took you to Solovki once.’

  ‘You were tracking me,’ he said then, abruptly, accusingly, but in a low, matter-of-fact voice: ‘So that’s it. Hunting me. Hunting me down.’

  ‘No, Professor Haffner,’ I said: ‘Of course not—it’s coincidence’—but even as I said this, the word sank into me, and it seemed to me that down the years I had been waiting for just such a search to set out on: a quest—and if I had found him by chance—the purest chance—that was in keeping with my hopes, submerged hopes—it was almost an embodiment of some half-conscious intent or will. I had been striving to find that journey, complete it, find a means of going back to that encounter—as if it had held the secrets of the world and they could only be rescued by claiming it anew.

  All through this exchange Haffner had been standing, unmoving, facing the cloister gardens and the dark, resting one hand on the carved column at his side, running his fingers across the interlacings on the figures carved into the stone. Abruptly he swivelled. He looked straight at me. ‘What do you want?’ he said: ‘Absolution?’

  ‘For what! For caring about what you had to say for yourself so long ago, when no one cared, or knew you in the outside world? For making the trip to see you in those leaden years, and tracking you down in your little book-lined room, and listening for hours on end?’

  ‘And what do you remember? What stood out for you, back then, in all I had to say?’

  His voice was cold, still, and hostile, but a suggestion of a new tone, curious, almost sentimental, had crept in.

  ‘Fragments: what else, but your centrepiece? The way you saw the world lying in fragments—everything lost, and wrec
ked, and scattered; and the task of life was in collecting up those fragments, looking, seeking for the resonances and the echoes—the shards—you said what was left to us has been exploded, pulverised, reduced to rubble; no more order, nothing, no more structure or harmony, no sequence—and the hardest thing’s to find words that fit together, that hold any truth at all.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said then, slowly: ‘Perhaps I did think something like that once. A doctrine. Something to live by. To make some sense of our intuitions: all the affinities that we can feel lying so buried in the world. Fragments to search for, even—even where we were then.’

  He laughed, a short, bitter laugh, more yelp or catch of breath than anything.

  ‘What a stroke of fate,’ he went on. ‘Old times come revolving round: at the end of twilight, in a rundown cloister, in a deadbeat, forgotten town.’

  He reached into his coat once more, and pulled out a cigarette packet, and struck a match. As he did so, I reached out, and turned the pack: Belomorkanal—the blue blaze, the golden ground, the map, the modish letters in Cyrillic script. I smiled.

  ‘The cigarette of ideology—and mourning,’ I said.