Daniel, the first message in more than a year.
You used to say I found it difficult to admit to my mistakes.
You used to say I was appallingly reluctant to apologise.
So let me be absolutely clear.
1. I made a terrible mistake in breaking up our marriage.
2. It was entirely my fault.
3. I am so very sorry.
I very much want to see you. Please – will you see me?
I love you even better than before.
D
She stared at the screen. The email had come in at four in the morning Melbourne time, corresponding to five o’clock yesterday in London. Had he dithered over it all day before deciding to send it? She read the email again, she read it several times. She left the computer, she paced the flat, she went out to the tiny balcony. Her mind was on hold, no thoughts, no hopes, just his words turning over until they might have been Sanskrit for all the meaning they had.
Then she returned to the screen and read again. And suddenly her mind was thrown into aggrieved and critical overdrive. ‘A terrible mistake’ he wrote. Only one mistake? There was the initial mistake of falling for his research assistant. Then: he carried on a secret affair; he deceived his wife; he lied to her every day for four months; he dumped her to pursue his new love; he destroyed their past; he scuttled their future; he treated her as if she had never mattered. The mistakes were many and profound. And now he’s sorry. For which bit? He says nothing about regretting the affair. Nothing about ending his marriage. And if he’s not sorry about Sally then he could run off with a twenty-year-old next time. He could run off with a wombat if he were so inclined. And sorry for whom? If young Sally has dumped him as Nina suspects she has, he’s most likely sorry for himself. And even if he’s done the dumping, he’d still be feeling sorry for himself in his suddenly solitary state. Nowhere in this email is there any concern for her, any acknowledgment of what she, Nina, has been through. Of course ‘I love you better than before’ wants to suggest he’s learned by his mistakes, but she remains shocked he could have acted as he did in the first place.
Her laptop is open, she is fuming at the screen when, just after eleven – midnight London time – another email appears. It’s a copy of the first email with the question: did you receive this? Then a couple of minutes later there’s another message.
What I did was unforgivable. But you always said that far too much is made of forgiveness – that some actions are forever unforgivable but not reason enough to break up a marriage. You may have found someone else, I wouldn’t blame you if you had. I’m so sorry. I never loved her like I loved you – like I still love you. The time with her and the time without you has shown me what I’ve lost. Will you please let me know if I have any hope.
Hope? She’s an aficionado of hope. Hope dampens pain that would otherwise be unbearable, hope soars on currents of longing, hope keeps you going when circumstances would bring you to your knees. Hope is a house of straw.
She is not thinking as she leaves the flat, she doesn’t know what to think. Although with the TIF meeting just an hour away she needs to keep her husband quiet. She knows you can numb a small defined portion of mind – if not for this skill she would have been unable to work since Daniel left – and that’s what she needs to do now, a squirt of anaesthesia to blank out the events of the previous hour.
Twenty minutes later Nina entered the city precinct. Daniel’s email was still throbbing, like a drumbeat at odds with the main tune. She made yet another attempt to silence him, pull her mind into line and orient herself to the task ahead. When the meeting is over, she said aloud, I’ll attend to you. But now I have to work. Now I need to focus on monuments.
Monuments. So many of which she had first seen with him. Perused, analysed and argued about with him. On his first visit to Melbourne, Daniel, with his stranger’s eyes, had observed how there was insufficient history in the city for the sort of jostling for space on street corners that occurred in central London; but nonetheless, he had been surprised at how many monuments there actually were. ‘It’s as if you Australians are making a deliberate effort to fill out your flimsy past.’ She’d defended Australia’s history, both black and white: it wasn’t flimsy, she said. And besides, she’d added, monuments were a British tradition and Australia was simply following that heritage (although he did start her wondering about the tendency of the second league to acquire both the muscles and garments of the first). They had stopped in front of famous men at intersections and outside neoclassical piles and perched on plinths in the city’s public gardens. So many explorers, jurists, politicians and military leaders great enough in their time to warrant a monument, and since forgotten. ‘Do you know who these people are?’ he had asked. She hadn’t, and now as she again read the names, there was still no recognition of the men, although the monuments themselves were vaguely familiar. She found it interesting that the pile of stone had more impact than who was represented; it was the sort of conundrum she and Daniel would have grappled with together.
The TIF people were expecting an overview of trends in memorialising – the topic of the paper she hadn’t sent. As she made her way through the city down to Docklands, she made a last attempt to shift Daniel from her mind. She recited Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, and a few verses of ‘The Highwayman’, followed by the ‘La Marseillaise’, and then John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’ and by the time she had finished with Auden’s ‘Tell Me the Truth about Love’ her mind was free of Daniel and ready to work.
She decided to begin her talk with the sponsored chairs found in the city parks of many major cities, including Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens; just ordinary park benches overlooking paths and lawns and lakes, each bearing a plaque on which was engraved a remembrance of a person or sometimes a couple – personal tributes yet strangely powerful in the way they reached out to strangers walking past.
Experience had taught her that setting up her presentation with such modest memorials was an effective way of counteracting the often huge monoliths people had in mind for their own projects. In memorialising, size tends to reflect significance and influence. Lenin, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Mao, Lincoln, Jefferson, these sorts of leaders all had towering statues. Then there were massive memorial structures like the Victory Monument in St Petersburg with its powerful narrative of the siege of Leningrad, and the colossal over-wrought Il Vittoriano in Rome to Victor Emmanuel II; even the Vatican itself, a conglomerate memorial to God and the Catholic Church. But huge monuments can mute and crush those who stand in their shadows; huge monuments can actually make individuals disappear. Nina was wary of whoppers and she tried to direct her clients away from them.
She expected many of the TIF committee to be familiar with the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park. This was an interesting project, one she had been determined not to like given all the hoopla surrounding the princess’s life and death. But on her first visit there – yes, with Daniel – she was captivated by the huge ring of moving water in the middle of a large park in the middle of a major city. The two of them had stood at the highest point of the water ring, and just like music can draw you into itself, so too this flow cascading down the slope in two directions. It was lively yet hypnotic; she could not have deflected her gaze even if she wanted. Slowly they had walked together down the slope, the channel of water sloshing and hissing over the small rock falls and sluicing into the granite walls, down down down to the lowest point where water from both sides of the ring met in a suddenly calm pool. They crossed one of the bridges into the central open space, the heart of the monument, and there they sat on the grass. The sound of the water, the breeze, the trees, the broad sky, even the muffled sounds of the other visitors created a rare peace.
She had returned to the monument several times since Daniel’s defection and had experienced the same tranquillity. She had only fleeting thoughts of Princess Diana during these visits, or none at all; rather the monument had her reflecting
on her own life, and less personally although more profoundly on life and death and the need to eschew the sort of conveyor-belt existence that would confine you to the same path from start to finish. It was during a visit to this monument that the possibility of a satisfying life without Daniel first entered her mind.
The TIF group was wanting a similarly meditative effect for their monument – a monument, she reminded herself, that probably would not and should not be built. But the committee needed to come to this decision themselves, an outcome more likely the better informed they were. The Princess Diana Memorial Fountain was a good example, and she could contrast it with the more spontaneous monument to Diana on the parapet above the Paris tunnel in which the fatal crash had occurred. Whenever she was in Paris, she felt compelled to visit this site, yet she always came away irritated. The hand-written messages left by bereft Diana pilgrims in French, English, Spanish, German, expressed love and loss and appreciation of the beautiful young princess, while at the same time revealing gaping absences in their own ordinary lives. Similarly the mountains of flowers in central London in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death. These offerings by strangers, Nina believed, said more about their own unexamined lives than the recently dead princess. (How different from that single bunch of drooping flowers taped to a roadside telegraph pole marking the spot where a person was killed in a motor accident. A spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a lover, someone who actually knew and loved the deceased person wanted to mark the spot where a life had ended and their own life was forever changed.) And then there was the Diana and Dodi Memorial at Harrods, a shrine-like installation that marked a new high in kitsch memorialising. The centre-piece consisted of a bell-jar under which stood the actual unwashed liqueur glasses that held Diana and Dodi’s last drinks. Whenever Nina came down the escalator and saw the shrine she had to stifle a laugh. But many were the times she had witnessed people weeping in front of it.
‘You’re hard on the ordinary person,’ Daniel used to say when she railed against flowers or teddy bears or dolls left by strangers at a significant site. And she’d reply that there would be no ordinary people if everyone gave more thought to what they did.
‘These displays are examples of mass behaviour,’ she said. ‘And it’s not hard to move the masses. We see a Hollywood romance and we cry – dozens of us, all strangers, crying together. We go to a football match and together we yell for our team and hurl abuse at the opposition. We attend a pop concert and throw ourselves into the general hysteria. We line The Mall for Diana’s funeral, we go to Ground Zero in New York, and in all these places we are part of a great mass movement of incontinent emotion. It feels so good.’
Although kitsch by itself, Daniel had reminded her, was insufficient reason for her to condemn a monument. He had laughed uproariously when she showed him the Animals in War Memorial in Park Lane, considered by many to be mawkishly sentimental, but one of her all-time favourites. Only in animal-mad England could such a memorial have been built, and on prime real estate too, and in 2004, so there could be no blaming nineteenth-century bleary-eyed romantics. It was a large monument with two life-sized, heavily burdened donkeys, together with a dog and a horse; and in bass relief on a curving wall was an array of animals from elephants to carrier pigeons to the glow worms used to light the trenches in the Great War. As for the caption, THEY HAD NO CHOICE, sentimentality did not begin to describe it. And yet she loved this monument – for what it said about the English, what it said about animals too.
If she was to describe the Animals in War Memorial to the TIF group then she ought to balance it with a more abstract structure – perhaps the 1962 Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation in Paris, a solemn construction weighty with symbolism located behind Notre Dame Cathedral. You tend to visit it after you’ve been to the cathedral, so you approach the Martyrs monument overheated with Gothic splendour. By the time you’ve walked down a long flight of narrow steps to the open space below, you feel as if you’ve entered a different world. The sky is overhead but you feel cut off from the life of the city. Whenever she has visited, she’s either been the only person there or one of just a handful, further exacerbating the sense of isolation and contemplative mood. The underground structure feels like an underworld; all cement, granite and metal it is made up of long passages, and cells – compartments – with triangular shapes used in abundance, symbolising the one hundred and sixty thousand people deported under the Vichy regime. They were mostly Jews, including eleven thousand children, but also political dissenters, members of the resistance, gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Engraved on the walls are words from a number of French luminaries, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Saint-Exupéry; but it is the quiet profound poetry of Robert Desnos that particularly moves her.
This place of solitude and reflection doesn’t convey the overwhelming factual information of the Holocaust museums; instead it provides a meditative space in which to ponder the human capacity for evil – boundless and horrifying – and acknowledge the human spirit for survival. It’s long been one of her favourites.
There were many more monuments she might mention (European, American, African – the locations of her own work – and none, she was well aware, drawn from the Asia–Pacific region), but as she made her way through the Docklands precinct towards her destination, she decided to hold back, listen first to what the committee had to say and then improvise from there. It was not the way she usually worked, but nothing about this day or this project was usual.
By the time Nina arrived at the offices of C.G. and C.K. Holdings she was eager to begin, and, not surprisingly, the meeting proceeded very differently from the last. She let the group talk about the sensibility of their project, prompting only with an occasional question. They all contributed except Professor Karim Qureshi. As the conversation surged around him, she could not help but notice the extraordinary range of expression that shaped his broad dark face. And then she saw his hand, the right hand: it had no fingers. How could she have not seen this at the first meeting? And on the back of the hand, running over the wrist and disappearing beneath the cuff of his shirt, was a ropey swirl of scars. He wore a T-shirt last time; his arms were bare. How could she have not noticed?
She must have been staring because he moved his hand from the surface of the table and, with a pause in the discussion, he spoke for the first time. ‘How do you balance art with the purpose of the monument, the monument’s message?’
That rich resonant voice with its lyrical accent: she expected he was a mesmerising teacher.
She addressed the group. ‘All monuments are public art. And you’re right,’ she glanced at Karim, ‘the challenge is to get the balance right. Often there’s conflict between the more artistically inclined citizens and the general community.’
She pulled up some photos of the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki. ‘This organic, pipe-like structure is an early example of an abstract monument, selected by competition in 1961. When it won there was an uproar, not dissimilar to the controversy surrounding the Sydney Opera House design. But eventually, as with the Opera House, public taste caught up with the artistic vanguard and the monument’s now highly valued by both Finns and tourists alike.’
‘All those metal pipes don’t evoke Sibelius for me,’ Father Jamie Gray said.
The Uniting Church minister, Elizabeth, was smiling. ‘They do for me. The pipes look like the rise and fall of sound.’
‘That’s because you already know the monument honours Sibelius,’ Father Jamie persisted.
‘Everyone does,’ Elizabeth said. ‘There are signs in several languages, and one of the compromises to placate the literalists was to add a realist bust of Sibelius alongside the abstract sculpture.’ She paused before adding, ‘I visited Finland with my husband a few years ago.’
‘Surely you can have both art and message,’ Nadirah Harvey said.
Nina nodded. ‘But literal, figurative structures often don’t receive an aesthetic imprimatur, wh
ile abstract structures can muddy the message of the monument. To get the balance right is difficult. And the issue’s further compounded by the fact that art can date.’
‘Great art doesn’t date,’ said Charlie Goldstein.
‘But it takes time for great art to reveal itself,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And in the process much of what was thought might become great has lost its kudos.’
Nina showed them slides of the Martyrs of the Deportation monument in Paris. She explained why this was one of her favourite monuments: its use of poetry, the solitude, how the abstraction and symbolism of the structure provide ample cognitive space for observers to draw on their own experiences and understandings.
‘I think all those sharp metal triangles look passé,’ Jamie said. ‘And the lettering is so last century.’ He would, by Nina’s calculation be one of the youngest members of this group.
‘Art aside, even literal monuments can date,’ the rabbi said, rearranging herself in her chair. She was pregnant, Nina suddenly realised, Lorrie Aarons was heavily pregnant. ‘Has anyone seen the scouting monument in Washington DC?’
A couple of people smiled and nodded.
‘It consists of a huge naked man and a scantily clad goddess-type woman flanking a small boy in full scouting regalia,’ Lorrie continued, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘With paedophilia such a hot topic these days I’m surprised it hasn’t been ripped down.’
Nina riffled through her photo library and found an image of the monument. There were gasps and laughter and Father Jamie, so recently critical of the modernist Sibelius Monument said, ‘Give me abstraction any day.’
‘There’s art and message to consider,’ Nina continued, ‘and abstract and figurative forms. And there’s another interesting phenomenon too: when a structure never intended to be a monument acquires monumental force.’ She told them about the spacious, well-appointed bathroom at Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. ‘This bathroom with its large white basins, its taps and mirrors, its clean walls and floors was built for display purposes only; it was never used. When members of the Red Cross made an official visit to check that the Jews were not being maltreated, they were shown the sparkling bathroom and not the filthy rat-holes where the Jews lived and died in overcrowded and insanitary conditions, weakened by disease and starvation rations.
The Memory Trap Page 18
