by Heather Rose
He was acutely aware of people talking all around him. He closed his eyes and then he opened them, met Marina’s gaze and everything stopped.
LYDIA FIORENTINO, LEVIN’S LYDIA, SWAM in the night sky and she had no edges. She moved slowly, languorously, and the moon was her guide. The night embraced her and she was a tiny light in a great sea of lights.
Later she was no longer afloat on stars and sea. She was held, carried, washed. She had no words. She had no sound. She was amorphous, diaphanous, pixelated. She was a confluence of atoms released at the moment the universe began. She was a tender mottled sky drawn across the dawn. An ocean of clouds above the sand dunes. The days were a single strike on a triangle. The nights were voyages. She was the dove in Max Ernst’s forest. She was Miro’s star watching over the woman and bird. She was Man Ray’s Pisces lying in the shallows and a silver fish at first light. She was a rose from Dorothea Tanning’s table. She was the gold in a Turner and the green in a Seurat. She was gone from somewhere and there was only a faint remembering of things past. A flash of an eye, a fabric, a voice, a name. She must come back. But where was back? There was only here. Nothing was everything. She had no form.
She was the flower in the egg in the hand beside the pool with Narcissus. Ah, it went, and was lost, these four seasons. She awaited the angel of uncertainty. Tight clouds stood watch on the horizon.
She was washed in rain. A shower of warmth above or below the fog. She was returned to a cocoon of white. Light played beyond her eyes. There was a taste in her mouth. And another. Good. Good, they said to her. That’s very good, Lydia.
There was an arm and another, a leg and another. They were moved by people who came by day and night. There were voices and faces telling her things. They said over and over, Lydia, Lydia, Lydia. They moved the hand, the foot.
They wrapped her in blankets and light burned against her eyelids. She had no name for the warm thing and the bright surfaces that changed through the day. She had no words at all. Words were structures that she glimpsed before they fled again. Sun—it came to her and was gone. Ocean. And then the great void of everything returned and she floated. Weightless, formless, speechless, timeless.
But time did pass. Weeks and months.
At some point she was aware of a young woman but she had no words. She liked the place with no words and no feelings. It was simplicity. There was a gentleness lulling her through light and dark and all the colours and textures in between.
Flavours washed over her tongue, sweet, soft, bright, dense. She tasted and with the taste came pictures. Faces returned to her and patterns, carpets, smells that made her think of rooms and people. Vanilla. It came back as if someone had typed the word on her mind and she read it to herself, sounding it out with some inner voice.
There was no outer voice. She was a silent observer of the room and its visitors. She was a recipient of sound. She was an inhabitant. She was a watcher and she was observed.
Shadows and sunlight moved in particles across the glass. She was the silence of mist coming in from the sea. She was the forming and unforming of clouds, paint stroke after paint stroke brushing the sky. She was the hush of waves on the heartbeat of the coast and every moment was new and new and new again.
Now there was flavour on her tongue. Now she swallowed. Now she woke. Now she saw birds leaping into the sky. Now she saw the sea discoloured and rippled, the sand darkened. Now there was music. Music? Was that music? Yes. Yes.
Music swirled her through fragments and the road of memories coiled, rising up, wanting to whisper a name, make a sound, a sound, but no words for that were allowed inside her.
She dreamed her body was laid out, her feet in Manhattan and her head resting in the Great Lakes. She stretched herself further up into Canada, south to Boston and Washington. She pushed her hands and fingers across into the Midwest, slipping them up into the grooves of the Rockies, stretched her toes all the way down to Florida. Her other arm reached all the way to the grey pebbled beaches of Portugal. Her body continued to slip and stretch out around the world. Her skin swam into coastlines and over mountains. She gazed out into the void of darkness and she wanted to step off the world and slip away into starlight. She was sure that was the way home.
Home, she thought. Home. The words in her mind had been drained and emptied. A noise lived within her and like her it had no voice. Like her it could not move. It could not reach out and speak to the people who came to the room. Together she and the loneliness watched the light and the dark and all the colours in between that the sea and the sky made for her each day and she understood that something was waiting. Something was waiting and the stars could not have her back yet.
On the table by the window, letters and postcards accumulated. The nursing staff set them out so that Lydia could see them. They understood it was a strange case. It was Ms Fiorentino’s explicit wishes, spelled out in court documents, to be left alone save for her daughter and a few select girlfriends who came regularly. But it was hard, seeing it. It was hard to see anyone in the state she was in. She gave no indication of hearing or seeing anything at all. Her physiotherapy indicated that her body was, for the time being, able to maintain some strength. But it was probably only a matter of time before she had another stroke or her kidneys gave out. It was a horrible condition and people didn’t last very long once it had gone this far.
They had seen worse, and they had seen better. This wasn’t a place from which many people got to go home. But every now and again there was a sort of miracle. Sometimes the stroke victims regained movement. Sometimes the coma people woke up.
The staff read aloud to Lydia the letters that came every week from someone called Yolanda.
Dear Mrs Fiorentino,
I hope you are feeling better every day. This week I made for Mr Levin a lamb casserole and the frittata he always likes because the weather is warmer. Rigby is enjoying the couch by the piano and prefers to eat at the moment only tinned sardines. The lemon tree is showing signs of liking life out on the balcony.
And always every letter concluded with the same few lines.
I restocked with the usual items and everything is ready for when you are well enough to come home.
We all miss you very much and keep you in our prayers.
Yolanda
AND SO, AT LAST, THESE two people meet in person on two chairs opposite one another. Marina Abramović and Arky Levin. I am assigned to stand beside them—memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am. House elf to the artists of paint, music, body, voice, form, word. I have acquired the habit of never saying too much. And the trick of dropping in, rapping on the door of their minds in the moment before waking, in the moment of solitude staring out a window, in a cafe where everything for a moment stops, under a tree watching sunlight, when life is a set of dominos falling into place or a single moment of revelation about what comes next.
Of course, it can be years between moments. Mostly people say no. They say no, I don’t want to get out of bed. No, I don’t want to work that hard. No, today I don’t have time. No, I’m not listening right now. People say no so often, and then they wonder why they feel so desperate. Desperation does not especially interest me. Being available, paintbrush in hand, pen, keyboard, clay, stage, strings at the ready, is much more attractive. And sometimes I just need to wake things up.
Do you see now the difficulty of my task? All that they are is stored up loud and insistent inside them. But what does it take to be an artist? They have to listen. But do they listen? Most people are filled up with a lifetime of noise and distraction that’s hard to get past. At least that’s how it feels.
Levin was listening now. He was pinned to the chair. Pinned to Marina’s face. She was more formidable than he had imagined. Her eyes were moist ebony. He had imagined those eyes looking at him morning after morning, but they were deeper, she was further away and so much closer too. Was she seeing him? What was she seeing? From the crowd there was a percussive und
ertone that might have been breathing or heartbeats. Levin’s own pulse was slippery. Above him the atrium soared into the sunlight. He thought of Leonard Cohen.
The skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend
and all the rain falls down, amen,
on the works of last year’s man.
He saw himself standing in the Kawa forest. Marina walked beside him on the bank of a river. She laughed at something as if they were old friends. There were ferns crusted with the finest layer of snow and an arc of birds, long-necked and grey, passing overhead. There were trees with trunks wet and red and glistening and sun falling down like rain between the branches. He saw light falling as if it was rain. He saw every particle of life.
There is nothing to be afraid of, she said to him. We have walked this way before. He saw two sets of footprints in the snow ahead. He heard a calling bird. He saw the moon arcing between the trees, a sliver of moon in a blue sky, and she said, We are all these things. We are no different to earth. We are no different to time. We are rock and leaf and bird, earth-born and earth-fed and earth-returned when we die. For forty thousand years we have been eating and living and burying ourselves on this one sphere of earth. See how we know the pattern of things, if we only watch.
He saw Marina standing on the edge of a sand dune in another place where the sky was magenta and the earth was pink. Then they were in another place where two moons rose above a midnight sea, and they walked the shoreline. He knew he was going home.
But not yet, she said. Not yet. You have forgotten something very important.
He felt a sense of utter loneliness as if he had never lived in a world with anyone else. He wanted to hold Marina’s hand but she was a ghost and she was Lydia.
Was there a secret tally somewhere in every marriage for each kiss, each orgasm, each Sunday morning? He saw the counter ticking over and coming to a halt. He saw Lydia’s eyelashes, so very pale without mascara. He looked at her eyes and they were still the green of the sea thirty metres out.
‘Lydia?’ he said.
He saw her in a white room. He saw her watching the sea. He saw the sunlight that fell on the floor. He saw her lift her hand. She reached for a pencil. It fell.
He bent down to pick it up for her.
‘Lydia?’ he said again.
She did not turn her face. He opened her fingers very gently and placed the pencil in her hand. There was a notebook on her lap. He leaned down and smelled her hair.
‘Can we go home now?’ he asked. ‘I think it’s time we went home.’
Marina leaned towards him and he was speared with pain. He felt as if her face was that of an ancient woman, and now a boy, and now a girl, a monk, a nun. Now it was a bird, and now a fish, and now a tree and now it was a crystal, filled with power and understanding. Again it became human, but it was a face both eternal and temporal, dead and alive, calm and terrifying.
It is not about comfort, he heard her say, as if she had spoken the words right into his head. It is not about convenient. It is not about forgetting. It is about remembering. It is about commitment. Only you can do it. And you must be fearless.
When he left the square he hardly trusted himself to walk. Healayas watched him go and did not disturb him. She knew how deconstructed it was possible to feel after the experience of Marina.
Downstairs in the lobby, Levin looked at his watch. He found a quiet spot by the rear doors and dialled the number of Paul Wharton at his law firm. Wharton would not be in until tomorrow morning, he was told. Levin made an appointment. After that he called Alice. He remembered Healayas, and texted her, but she had to stay in New York for the final day of The Artist is Present. Then he rang Hal.
‘Do you think we could take a drive?’ he asked.
AND SO WE ARRIVE AT day seventy-five. The final convergence. The floodlights are on. Marco Anelli watches Marina Abramović emerge from the green room and cross the square. He watches Davide arrange her white dress about the chair. He sees Marina’s body submit to the chair this one last time. They are all smiling, but he does not want to think about it being the last day. He cannot afford to lose concentration.
He settles his camera and tripod at the top of the square and takes a single photograph of Marina as she stares at him down the long lens. The security team take their respective places.
One of the guards raises two fingers to indicate two minutes to go. The live feed clicks on. Viewers in Chicago, in Minneapolis, Montreal and Mexico, in Cape Town and Cairo, Sydney and Salzburg, in Helsinki, Istanbul and Iceland begin watching.
The gallery, the noise, the time, the people, the fatigue, the weather, the concrete beneath his feet, the white walls, the face of Marina, all of it had become like waves on the beach. Marco has lived so close to it he no longer hears it. Now sometimes in the atrium, when his thoughts arrive, they sound so loud it feels as if his mind is shouting.
When the queue is assembled, he goes along the line collecting permission slips as if it was any other day. He focuses the lens on each face and watches for the moment when intensity spills from the eyes. He settles into the space and the light and the performance.
He has moved past himself. The pain that had been vivid in his legs and lower back, and his neck and shoulders, after almost three months on his feet every day, bending over his camera, standing on concrete, has left him. He feels light, almost transparent. He has survived the show. When he’d agreed to do it, he’d never thought of it as an act of survival. He had wanted to do it with all his heart. And now it is almost over. It reminds him of a question he was asked a few days before by one of the guards. ‘When you get to heaven, what would you like God to say to you?’ ‘Not now!’ he had joked. But today he just wants God to say, ‘Well done.’
He had not expected the emotion that crowds the atrium, the joy that is in so many eyes and faces. It is as if some new idea of life has occurred to them. If I die today, Marco thinks, then it will be too soon.
AFTER DANICA ABRAMOVIĆ’S FUNERAL IN Belgrade, Marina had gone to her mother’s apartment to begin the work of cleaning out her mother’s things. In the bedroom she had found clothes ordered by colour—beige suits then blue suits, summer coats and winter coats. Light-coloured shoes, dark-coloured shoes.
The bed had a pale green counterpane. The bedside lamp that was never turned off in the night was finally off. In the drawer there was still a loaded gun. All her life Marina had known her mother’s war stories. Her father had told them often. On the battlefield, as strangers, her mother gave her father a transfusion of her own blood when there was no other way to save his life. She had begun a degree in medicine six months before the Nazi invasion in 1941. Vojo had survived and, when he had recovered, he had ridden back into battle. The war had gone on.
A year later, still fighting, Vojo came across a group of sick partisans fleeing oncoming German soldiers. He lifted back the blanket to discover the woman, Danica, who had given him her blood. She was dying from typhus. He lifted her onto his white horse and rode with her to safety.
Danica never talked about the war. She sat in silence as Vojo told stories of waiting in snow for the Germans to ride past the explosives he and his men had buried in the roots of trees. How he was shot twelve times in the back and was saved by the thickness of his coat. The time an axe handle flew all the way across a river and nearly cut off his hand. The time he had to eat his own dead horse and later lost his moustache in the heat of an explosion.
But while cleaning out her mother’s apartment, Marina came across a trunk under the bed she had never seen before. Marina spread the contents on the green counterpane. There were scrapbooks full of articles about her shows. But under the scrapbooks was a leather wallet containing documents signed by Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia. They noted that her mother had fought in seven Partisan battles against the Nazis. They awarded her mother the highest medal for bravery. In 1944, while she had been leading a convoy of trucks filled with wounded soldiers to a nearby hospital,
they had come under intense fire. The fuel tanks were targeted. Everywhere there was fire and explosions. Chaos ensued. But Danica Rosic carried thirty soldiers, men and women, some half-conscious, some with terrible injuries, on her back and in her arms. Hauling them through the snow, somehow avoiding bullets and grenades, she brought each one of them to safety.
AT HOME, JANE MILLER WATCHED Marina Abramović on the webcam.
‘Today is the day,’ she kept thinking. ‘Today is the day.’
And she ignored the washing she’d done for her daughter that needed bringing in, and the ants that were invading a light switch on the wall, and the emails she needed to reply to, and watched. She understood that her fate and Marina’s were somehow linked. When Marina stood up, Jane too must stand up. There had been this time of mourning and the mourning would live forever in her. Karl was as much a piece of her as her liver or pancreas. Grief was as tangible as rain. Millions of people were suffering from it at any one time. It’ll pass, people said, but it didn’t really.
Grief was a threshold thing that lived at the heart of the inevitable. She sensed that when Marina stood up, she, Jane, would take her place one step back from the inevitable. She would walk across Spain. She would carry her grief and her love and her observations of a life of fifty-five years. Here at home her children and their children would be among their own inevitabilities. And maybe this was art, she thought, having spent years trying to define it and pin it to the line like a shirt on a windy day. There you are, art! You capture moments at the heart of life. A boy waiting for the eggs to poach. A crowd listening to music in a park or walking in the rain or bathing in the Seine. Liberty leading the people and the guns of the firing squad raised against the men at the wall. The bloom of waterlilies and the anguish of a scream, the red square that lived in every heart, a rhythm of colour across a wheat field, stars wheeling through a night sky.
