Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  ‘Steven, if I were there I would have to be involved. I would see a starving child and I would share my food. If I saw a pistol raised against a prisoner’s head, I’d try to do something. I’d have to help. Is that the difference between a woman and a man: wanting to become involved, not just be a camera?’

  There’d been the village behind Ho-duc. That was Vietnam 1970. They’d spared the children, at least he’d got that out of them. Hadn’t got any pictures; they’d exposed all ten rolls of film he carried. Cambodia, a year later wasn’t it? Cambodia anyway, he’d got the wounded soldier through a Khmer roadblock, gave the soldier a shirt and pretended he was his driver. Cambodia again? One green hell was like another. It was the time a sniper had burst open the lieutenant’s throat; the rest of the patrol had been too shit-scared to move and who could blame them; in the end he’d led them back from the river and out into the shrill sunlight. Also, somewhere along the way there had been a baby, so emaciated he’d carried it in his airline bag; had to knock it out with Johnnie Walker in case it squawked. There must have been other times. Not much when set against these four walls, too little in her eyes. But if you turned into a Sister of Mercy in that hideous world, you’d stopped doing your work. Couldn’t she understand? That’s what it was: a job.

  Steven tried a smile which didn’t work. She looked at him as if asking for some explanation for his presence with a camera among the suffering. He said: ‘Just look on me as being another damn critic. After all, my stuff appears in the papers too. These are my notices of the dramas staged in the Vietnam theatre, the Cambodian theatre, all the rest. And dear God,’ finally, he was murmuring to himself, ‘the show runs and runs.’

  Ilona said: ‘I need a drink.’

  Steps led up to a gallery that ran the length of the studio. The gallery had a wooden balustrade so that you could look down on the studio. It could have been the minstrels’ gallery in a baronial dining hall. Or the upper level of the stage in an Elizabethan theatre, making do for the balcony in Romeo and Juliet.

  At the top of the steps Ilona turned. The exhibition had a fascination.

  ‘War must be a drug. Can you feel any pity any more?’

  ‘Ilona, stop lecturing me. Your famous theatre group shows an actor dressed up as a military bully. All the smart people in London applaud and murmur how clever, how true, how marvellously liberal the new Marxism is. I show what is happening in the world, man killing man. My bullies don’t act. The victims are real.’

  Nothing more was said. In the stillness Steven was aware of tears in Ilona’s eyes and he thought: actress. She came and put her arms round his chest and hugged him, which he took as being her way of forgiving him, or of absolving herself. She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and he saw the she-rain of emotion had blown away. There was a final sniff and then the sunshine of her smile.

  ‘Alors, what a reunion. You’d think we were old enemies. No, don’t tell me: when old enemies meet again they slap each other on the back and pronounce themselves fine fellows and have a drink. Steven, a drink! Where is your battered hip flask? I am a mortally wounded comrade in the battle of life and it is your sacred photographer’s duty to succour me with your second-last drop of whisky. The last drop you will of course, like the true professional you are, save for yourself. But quick, I am dying.’

  She bounced up and down with the impatience of a child. It was a fresh display of energy and enthusiasm. Tears and misunderstandings were set aside.

  ‘Help me, help the dying. Au secours, monsieur. A boire, nom de Dieu, à boire. Tu ne comprends pas que je crève de soif, hein?’

  She stretched out for a helping hand or a helping glass. Then, abruptly, she skipped away across the gallery to one of the doors that gave on to Steven’s private quarters. She flung back the door and danced inside and stopped, clapping her hands.

  ‘Oh Steven, it’s fantastic. Bravo, bravo!’

  4 - London, now

  Here were a hundred marvels: glitter and delight she could only clap her hands at. It was more than Ilona could take in at one glance. She came out, caught Steven by the wrist and pulled him after her. She lived in a world where tears and laughter came every day, and she was gurgling now. Also touch was important. She would hold tight to someone to draw strength or seek comfort or share pleasure. Her fingers still pressed his wrist.

  ‘Such breathtaking things. Where did you find them? Not even in Vaci Street...’

  A wry smile finished the sentence. Hungarians boasted of Vaci Street as the rue St-Honore of Budapest. Honest eyes saw it more as Bond Street, the end where it degenerates into Oxford Street. In normal commerce Budapesters simply could not find the sumptuous hide-covered settee on which Ilona reclined with her hands behind her head. She kicked her heels in the air and trilled a few bars from Countess Maritsa. Rolling over she laid her cheek on the hide and inhaled the rich seductive smell of leather. She bounced on to the floor.

  ‘Disgusting and ostentatious. No wonder we cannot tolerate such things.’ Dropping her voice an octave, she peered along a haughty nose at him. ‘I shall take two. Kindly have them wrapped.’

  Steven bowed. ‘As madam wishes.’

  Ilona saw the room as a stage, a new show opening, launching herself into a dozen parts. She took swift strides to the lamp standing in one corner. Its standard was in a huge curve two metres high and ended in a great hemisphere of a stainless steel shade. She stood to attention under the shade, stiff and unmoving. Two hundred watts of light poured down on her close shorn hair. Her arms were tight against her sides.

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘Egyptian mummy?’

  ‘Idiot!’

  She was a wonder to Steven. He should have had a camera in his hands. Her lipstick caught the dazzles, the grooves of her lips reflected it, a Manhattan skyline in miniature. He tried again: ‘Twenty-first century space commuter?’

  ‘Can’t you see what I am? I am rigid with jealousy. And you are Steven Curtis, the infamous international corrupter. Luckily jealousy is a bourgeois characteristic which no longer inhabits the breast of righteous citizens. So there.’

  Ilona made a perky face at him, sticking out an urchin’s tongue. Then it was a skip in the air and a dancer’s half-turn. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He watched as you watch the face of the one you love, absorbed in every movement and expression. Her beauty dulled the tinsel of the room. He smiled and smiled at her antics.

  On the wall were a pair of graphic paintings, cartoons with pretensions. Brushed aluminium frames enclosed bold poster colours of vivid green, canary yellow and Kremlin red. One showed the rear view of a striped canvas chair on the beach; a pair of feet stuck into the air above the top of the chair. The other showed an open door and a cat being booted out; a fishtail licked out of the cat’s mouth.

  ‘Miaou.’

  She dropped on all fours, her fingers deep in the long pile of the white carpet, a black cat with arching back and wicked slanting eyes. But then her eyes flicked away to the smoked glass table at the far end of the room. Steven, engrossed in her, saw those eyes deepen. She stood up and picked her way across to the table.

  ‘And this? What is it?’

  ‘Food. What does it look like?’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘Us. It’s our dinner.’

  ‘The two of us? You haven’t invited the Queen and the royal husband and all the starveling princes?’

  Nor the starveling Ethiopians, nor the emaciated Indians. Steven had invited none of them. Two place settings were laid. Ilona’s eyes were dark and she stood as if angry.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You bought all this food just for you and me?’

  Her mind was on the photo gallery below; a principle was deeply offended. Steven said: ‘This evening we have twenty-five years to make up. Around the world in one meal. From the Ardennes, raw ham. From Strasbourg, foie gras. From Scotland, smoked salmon. From Iran, caviar...’

  In the midst of this cook’s tour her r
esolution wavered. She darted out a hand.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘From Normandy, Camembert.’

  The Camembert box was as precious as a chalice in her hands. The label had golden fleur-de-lys and a portrait of Napoleon in black, red and blue. Napoleon wore his brooding expression, wondering how far it was to Moscow, or how far back.

  ‘Steven, I want to take it home.’ She hugged the box to her. ‘I want to give it to somebody, a present.’

  ‘Please,’ he said. He gestured at the table. ‘Take anything you like.’

  ‘Just the box. I’m in love with it. Wouldn’t you adore to get a box like this?’

  ‘But I have…’

  ‘Pedant! Clod-hopper! Where’s your soul? I know — I’ll buy a tie to put in the box, the tie of one of the famous English schools. Oh please, Steven...Oooh!’

  She broke off. In her eyes was hunger of a peculiar kind.

  Four days had passed since Steven had stumbled across Ilona by chance on stage. They were days when his eagerness to meet her again had grown. He wouldn’t throw a party for her, with forty people screaming and never a moment with her alone. They would have a civilized dinner, the two of them, because she was Ilona Kisfaludy whom he’d known so long ago. The dinner had grown as he planned it, with visits to Harrods and Soho and the cheese shop in Jermyn Street. He didn’t see the meal as showing off his riches, or the West’s; rather as something very special for Ilona. But first she had hungered after an empty cheese box. And now this: a bunch of bananas.

  It wasn’t the Waterford crystal she admired. It wasn’t the other fruit in the bowl. She stroked one of the bananas, running her fingers along its slight ridges. She picked up the bunch and cradled it against her cheek, feeling the smoothness, her skin rubbing against its summer-sun skin, her eyes matching its dark flecks of ripeness. She inhaled the sweet muskiness and lifted her face as worshippers do to catch the drifting smoke of incense.

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘How could you understand? You have everything. If I searched the courtyard I’d discover your private carp pond. Or a cage of quails you keep for their eggs. So maybe on the roof you have a heated greenhouse and grow your own bananas.’

  ‘You never have bananas?’

  ‘Not often. From time to time there is a consignment from Cuba. But they can’t supply the whole of our world. And there is disease in their plantations. So bananas are...’

  He waited.

  ‘It’s difficult to explain. You have your smoked salmon, your caviar, everything. Bananas are, well, something special.’

  ‘Special?’

  ‘Yes Steven, special.’ Ilona mouthed the word at him, imparting a great secret.

  Twice she’d used the word. Steven didn’t give a damn about bananas. They were part of the architecture of a fruit bowl. To a starving African child, a banana would be special. But to Ilona?

  ‘Take water,’ she said. ‘Here you turn the tap and water flows. You bath in it, flush it away, never consider it. In the Sahara water becomes special because it is rare.’

  Steven shrugged. A banana was a banana.

  ‘Special. You don’t understand.’

  But Steven thought he was beginning to. ‘Tell me if I have it right. In your order of things bananas are sold only in special shops to special people with special passes. Bananas! What a bloody system where bananas are a privilege. Isn’t that a failure of imagination?’

  She replaced the bunch in the bowl with a good deal of dignity. With her back turned she spoke to him.

  ‘I think I want a drink. In fact I’m certain I want a drink. You haven’t offered me one.’

  He went to her and put out his hands. The slimness of her shoulders — for a moment he fancied he remembered the feel of them from twenty-five years ago.

  ‘Ilona...’ He laid a gentle kiss on the top of her head.

  He offered her a drink. He gave her no choice. He simply opened the bottle, the cork coming out with a boastful pop. She accepted the glass and peered at the cream of bubbles that died away on the surface.

  ‘From Champagne, I trust.’

  ‘Krug.’

  ‘Of course.’ She sipped and then knocked back the whole glass like medicine, which would certainly have raised the eyebrow of Madame Krug.

  Ilona proceeded to give a virtuoso performance of a hungry person. It was the miracle of the loaves and fishes, in reverse, Steven thought. Where the Ardennes ham had been laid in overlapping slices of pink perfection, there was nothing left. Every misty-grey egg of caviar disappeared. A brace of partridge became bones.

  She looked up from the table to ask: ‘Do you eat like this every day?’

  ‘What have I eaten?’ He smiled. ‘Where do you put it?’

  ‘I am a dancer,’ she said. ‘You forget.’

  Steven hadn’t forgotten. Ilona knew that. But still she skipped across the room. She danced for him. She moved with quick graceful steps, used the back of a chair like a dancer’s bar, practised high kicks, swung round with a leg straight out, forcing Steven to duck. She had a child’s energy, burning up calories.

  ‘There are some dancers who must starve themselves, like jockeys, or they become gross. I’m lucky. I can eat and eat and eat. I must eat because I am so furious in my work. Therefore, if you would be so kind…’

  There was foie gras enclosed in a pastry crust. Waiting at Fortnums he’d overhead a woman with a careless wave of her hand order ‘a couple of pounds of that meat pie over there’. To him foie gras was special — the word still rankled — and he cut them both a slice.

  She was eating too much, stuffing herself like a Strasbourg goose. Was it nerves or disappointment with Steven? She ate and didn’t talk. The silence in the room became oppressive. They both recognized it: a shadow thrown by the past. She launched herself suddenly: ‘Do you hear anything of people from those days?’

  ‘From those days?’ It could have been too much champagne —there were twin spots of colour high on his cheeks — but Steven was angry in a rush. She’d kept him waiting in the rain, criticized his profession, gorged herself on his food in spite of her moral lectures, and now this. Those days and its people were obviously consigned to the dustbin of history.

  ‘How are your parents?’ she asked.

  He answered with brutal simplicity: ‘They are both dead. My father died in 1958. The death certificate gave the cause as cardiac arrest. In plain talk he died of a broken heart. He was too old to leave so he stayed in Budapest when the Russian tanks returned. Life must have been hard for a teacher who wouldn’t enthuse about the State dogma. My mother died shortly after. She could think of no reason to go on living. Anyway, why should you care about my parents? They’re nothing to you.’

  Her jaw had slowed and stopped. ‘So what should I talk about? My politics? My art? The life I am pigheaded enough to enjoy? Can’t I even ask a question about your parents? Everyone has parents.’

  ‘Not like mine.’ Was he just part of history too? She’d forgotten about his parents? Let her hear now. The words streamed out. ‘They lived in a gaunt building in Matyas Square, in two rooms on the fourth floor. The building was grey and pitted with bullets from 1945. It had an iron-railed balcony but it was suicide to trust your weight to it. Anyway what was there to look at from the balcony? There was gravel in the square and stumps of trees and a bench. My father would look out of the window and if he saw a light in a certain window across the square he would shuffle out. It was a bar. If there was no light he would shuffle in the other direction, past the dirty brick school that he dreaded entering each morning. There must have been thousands of teachers like him at the end of the war. He’d had the hope beaten out of him by the Nazis, not knowing how to teach according to his liberal conscience, no more than he did when the communists seized power. How many took refuge in what he did each day: walk up the road to the borozo. It was eight steps down to the cellar bar. On most evenings he found it sixteen steps up. That is the sum of my father’s lif
e as I observed it. When finally he had no hope left he conveniently died. And my mother’s life. I’ll give you her biography now. My mother was beige. There, you know all there is of significance about my parents. So I propose a toast.’

  He topped up their glasses with champagne.

  ‘To the memory of my parents.’

  He touched his glass to hers and drank.

  ‘They are both dead,’ he said, ‘like the ones downstairs. The only difference is that those ones have photographs for a memorial. My parents have nothing. Or only our toast. But you’re not eating.’

  Despair comes first to the eyes. But her face was turned aside and her eyes were hidden. ‘Why did you buy all this food? We don’t starve.’ And why had he got in touch with her? He seemed angry whatever she said.

  There seemed no special order to the meal. It was smoked salmon he piled on her plate. ‘Another toast,’ Steven announced. ‘To our reunion after twenty-five years.’

  ‘A quarter of a century. That sounds even longer.’

  She ate a forkful, turning over in her mind whether it was the moment to leave. This was no happy reunion. She could invent a late rehearsal. Or an ideological session. They were no longer friends. When she had finished the plate she would make an excuse. Betrayed by greed, she stayed.

  ‘It’s delicious, your smoked salmon.’ She tried a smile and said: ‘After the revolution in Britain, everyone will eat smoked salmon.’

  ‘Then there’ll be no salmon left in the rivers. Just the special people will eat it. Like bananas.’

  Wanting to make light of it, to put him back in good humour, she said: ‘Dear Steven, you make us sound like a banana republic.’

  ‘Another toast. To bananas.’

  She drank dubiously to that.

  The champagne was finished. Steven fetched another bottle and put down a plate of pastries. Like all Hungarians Ilona adored sweet things. The pastry disappointed her.