The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  ‘I don’t understand why you want to get these photographs taken,’ said the porn producer, once he was installed in the only armchair. ‘I don’t think you’ll like my studio. Twenty years ago things were different, but there are no screenplays for these films nowadays. One of my scriptwriters has switched to television and is writing serial hospital dramas. Anyone can make a film today. Every housewife who needs money for the rent has her own website and camera. If you want to survive as a producer you have to specialize.’

  The porn producer had large hands. He never put them on the table, as if he were ashamed of them. He himself directed all the films he produced, he said.

  He had bought an almond cake and a raspberry cake in the village. The raspberry cake was very good, he told Sofia, she really must try it.

  ‘I’ve had to specialize, there was no alternative. I shoot films with large casts now. It’s not so easy for amateurs to imitate those.’

  Eschburg and Sofia had watched two of his films. Each of them featured only one woman, a young woman. The women didn’t seem to be professional actors; they were more like students or trainees. First the porn producer interviewed the young woman in front of the camera. He talked to her perfectly normally, as you would when meeting someone socially. He asked how old she was, where she came from, what her interests were. While he was talking to her, men joined them. The camera focused only on their pricks. The men spurted their sperm into the woman’s face as she went on talking about ordinary, everyday subjects. She was not allowed to wipe the sperm off. After the interview with the porn producer the camera moved back, and then the woman had to fellate other men, twenty-five or thirty of them. She had at most a minute to bring each of them to climax. After all the men had sprayed their sperm onto her face, the camera accompanied the woman to the bathroom. While she was washing herself, the porn producer interviewed her again. Then he asked how she had felt about it.

  The porn producer ate a piece of the raspberry cake. ‘A film like that is made up of many small details,’ he said. ‘I’ve experimented with the setting as well; these days I use only black walls and floors.’

  Sofia told the porn producer what Eschburg’s pictures would look like, and what changes they would have to make in the studio. She laid some drawings out on the table. The porn producer looked hard at everything, and asked questions about details. When they were discussing money, Eschburg asked how he was to pay the men.

  ‘I don’t pay them anything,’ said the porn producer. ‘They’re amateurs. They just have to have an up-to-date HIV test; I insist on that to protect the women. And they have to shave their genitals, but those are the only conditions. I always get more volunteers than I need. If you want to pay them, that’s your business, but it won’t cost you much.’

  The porn producer’s most successful film was called Venus In Her Bath Of Sperm. He had won the Erotic Film Industry’s prize for it, roughly equivalent to a platinum disc in the world of music.

  The porn producer drank his coffee. He had been talking a great deal, and now looked wearier than ever. Suddenly it was very quiet. Eschburg looked out of the window. There was a pile of freshly cut firewood outside the house, the billets of wood neatly stacked above each other; they would be dry by next winter. Beyond the firewood was the lawn, and beyond that the forest began.

  Eschburg thought of Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus. Kronos cuts off the genitals of his father Uranus and throws them into the sea behind him. The blood and sperm make the sea foam and give birth to Venus. Botticelli painted her face as grave and lovely; in his depiction, she remains remote from such things. She understands, she feels regret, but she never becomes a part of that world.

  ‘I’d rather make other films,’ said the porn producer, breaking the silence. ‘I’ve thought of making a documentary about the flight of migratory birds to Africa. Did you know that many birds fly five thousand kilometres to the warmer countries? They really do. They sense the angle of inclination of the earth’s magnetic field. But fewer and fewer birds have been flying south in the last few years. It’s because of climate change. The warm Gulf Stream and the cold Humboldt Current are being diverted.’

  The porn producer’s voice was softer now.

  ‘I suspect,’ he said, ‘that the migratory system may soon come to an end. Even today, starlings are overwintering in European cities. Perhaps I’ll make that film yet some day.’

  They sat in the living room for a little longer. The porn producer told them about his daughter who wanted to study archaeology. Then he suddenly got to his feet, went to the door without a word, and put his leather jacket on again. There was a splinter left from his wood-cutting on its woollen collar. He took Sofia and Eschburg back to their car, and said they could come back any time they liked. He shot a film every week.

  They drove back through the forest. It was cooler now, and the trees were reflected in the painted finish of the car bonnet. Eschburg said that the birds on the walls had been arranged by colour, not by the tributaries of the Amazon. Sofia had tears in her eyes.

  He wanted to show her the old house beside the lake. The village had changed: the pharmacist had gone, to be replaced by two street cafés and a modern metal fountain. The street had been given a new layer of asphalt. The crooked box hedge and the drive up to the house had gone as well. There was now a car park, full of expensive-looking cars with number plates from Munich and Starnberg. Wooden holiday chalets stood in the park. They were painted white, had verandas overlooking the lake, and were all the same size.

  The old house had been renovated and re-roofed, and the first-floor windows had been enlarged. There was a notice beside the flight of steps up to the entrance: ‘Golf Club members only.’

  They went down to the lake. The landing stage, the boathouse and the stables had been torn down, and golf buggies were left in what had been the chapel. There were new white gravel paths between the holiday chalets, and new flowerbeds, and weatherproof plastic benches stood on the grass. A new teak terrace stood behind the house, with people sitting on it under sun umbrellas, wearing yellow and red tank tops and check trousers and skirts.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sofia.

  Eschburg wanted to tell her about the rusty weathervane on the roof. He wanted to tell her that the colours here had been bronze, lemon and cadmium yellow, cyan blue, olive and chromium oxide green, burnt sienna and sand. He wanted to tell her that reality moved faster than he did, that he couldn’t keep up. Things passed on, and he was only watching.

  All he actually said was, ‘That’s where the boathouse used to stand.’

  A man in a blue jacket came over the grass. ‘Excuse me, please, are you members?’ he asked. He was young and polite, and he had very white teeth.

  ‘No,’ said Eschburg.

  ‘Then I’m afraid I must ask you to leave the club premises.’

  Only the lake hadn’t changed. The reeds were still there, and the dark green trees, and the pollen drifting on the water.

  ‘I understand,’ said Eschburg.

  On the way to the airport they stopped at a fuel station. While Eschburg was waiting for Sofia after paying, he leafed through the newspapers and magazines on the shelves above the sweets and crisps. The headline of one tabloid announced that mankind was bankrupt, was fifty trillion euros in debt. In debt to whom, Eschburg wondered. He bought cigarettes and a new plastic lighter. On the way to the car he felt sick. He threw up between the petrol pumps.

  A few hours later they were back on the plane to Berlin. She’s the first woman I can imagine being with, he thought. I can be alone and silent with her. He put his hand on hers and held it tightly.

  Sofia looked at him as if he were a stranger.

  From above, they could see the neat and tidy fields, geometrically marked out strips, squares of maize and clover. The tidiness soothed Eschburg.

  18

  Eschburg worked on the pictures for two months. He entitled them The Maja’s Men. Sofia was shown lying on
a sofa copied by a set designer from the one in Goya’s paintings. In the first picture Sofia was naked. Sixteen men in suits were standing round her, staring at her. Sofia lay in the same position as Goya’s Maja, and was made up in the same way. The camera also saw her from Goya’s viewpoint.

  In the second picture, Sofia was dressed like The Clothed Maja. The men stood in exactly the same way as in the first picture, but now they were naked. They stared at Sofia with their heads in the same attitude as before, their pricks were erect, and pointing to Sofia’s face and body. Two of the men had sprayed their sperm on her blouse.

  The men were the amateurs used by the porn producer for his films. They were of different sizes; several had paunches, one had a plaster on his forearm, five were bearded, four wore glasses. The camera showed every slight reddening of their skin and every hair in ultra-sharp dimensions.

  Eschburg had taken the photographs in the porn producer’s studio, using a Hasselblad 503 CW and a 39 megapixels digital scan back. They had been exposed by Grieger in Düsseldorf on a LightJet 500 XL in the 1.80 x 3.00 metre format, and printed on acrylic plates.

  The two plates hung one behind the other. At first you saw only the photograph of Sofia naked and the men clothed. Then, at two-minute intervals, an electric motor pushed the front plate up over hinges, to reveal the picture with Sofia clothed and the men naked. After that the first photo slid back to its original position.

  When the electric motor had been installed, Eschburg climbed up the external metal staircase to the roof of the factory building. That first summer after moving into Linienstrasse four years earlier, he had sometimes spent the night up there. The two chestnut trees in the yard reminded him of home. Later, he often wondered why he had climbed to the roof that day. Perhaps it was the heat, or weariness, or something else for which he had no explanation.

  A woman was lying on the Hollywood swing seat that had always stood on the roof. She was wearing espadrilles and a silk kimono that looked old and grubby. Eschburg was about to go away again.

  ‘You’re welcome to stay,’ said the woman.

  The tar on the roof was soft from the heat. The woman had a pale scar on her forehead.

  ‘We met a few years ago when I was moving in,’ said Eschburg.

  ‘Senja Finks,’ the woman introduced herself. ‘I won’t shake hands; it’s too hot.’

  She was in her mid-thirties. She had a scarf over her hair and was wearing large-framed sunglasses. She looked rather unkempt.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said.

  The upholstery of the swing was stained and torn, with yellow foam stuffing coming out of it.

  ‘Would you like a beer?’ asked Senja Finks. ‘It’s chilled.’

  ‘Do you have anything else?’

  ‘Only beer.’

  ‘Then yes, I’ll have one,’ said Eschburg.

  Senja Finks opened a coolbox, took out a bottle and opened it with a plastic cigarette lighter. The swing moved slowly back and forth. Her perfume smelled of cedars and earth.

  ‘You take photographs, don’t you?’ asked Senja Finks.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eschburg.

  She took another beer out of the coolbox for herself. As she opened it, it foamed over on the kimono, her bare knee and the rooftop. The foam was quick to dry on the hot roof, leaving a white outline.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked Eschburg, feeling that he ought to ask some kind of question. ‘I mean, what is your accent?’

  ‘I’m from Odessa on the Black Sea. I’ve been here for over ten years.’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  ‘And what do you do?’ asked Eschburg.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. After a while she added, ‘I’ve done everything already.’

  Eschburg considered that last remark, and no longer felt awkward about remaining silent. They drank the beer; Senja Finks rolled herself cigarettes of dark tobacco and smoked. After a while Eschburg nodded off to sleep.

  When he woke up again, he didn’t know how much time had passed. He said he must go now. His knee hit the iron table, and a bottle half full of beer tipped over. Senja Finks was so quick that Eschburg didn’t see her movement. It was an automatic reaction, unconscious, precise, sure. She caught the bottle with her left hand before it could smash on the rooftop below them. She was breathing no faster than before.

  Her kimono had fallen open. Her stomach was flat and hard. Eschburg saw the scars all over her torso, long weals as if they had been left by a whip. There was an owl under her left breast. At first he thought it was a tattoo; then he realized that someone had branded it on her skin with a hot iron.

  19

  The exhibition of The Maja’s Men was a success. A TV cultural magazine programme had transmitted a preview, and on the afternoon of the opening there was a long line of people waiting outside the gallery.

  Sofia was wearing a black dress and had tied her hair back. She was slim and elegant as she moved among the guests, distributing business cards, laughing one moment and the next moment serious again.

  He thought of the ladder in her tights that had been bothering her before the exhibition, and how she had gazed out of the kitchen window that morning without saying anything. She had been watching a little boy playing in the yard. Then she had turned to him, and he had seen the question that she no longer asked and that he could not answer.

  Eschburg looked at Sofia. All this is possible only with her, he thought, the photographs, and still being with her, and enduring.

  Eschburg left the viewing, went back to Linienstrasse, packed a few things and went to the Charlottenburg municipal swimming pool. It had been built in 1898, three storeys high, a red brick building with a Jugendstil façade, its roof a structure of steel girders like a market hall.

  He went through the green iron door. At this time of day he was almost always alone here. He changed, showered, and let himself down the steps and into the pool. He swam a few lengths, fast and steadily. Then he turned on his back and looked up at the sky through the high glass ceiling. He breathed out and dropped to the bottom of the pool, where he stayed underwater until it hurt. The samurai of ancient Japan used to rise every morning saying, ‘You are dead.’ It made the idea of death easier. He thought of that now, and was at ease.

  Eschburg returned to his studio. There were prostitutes in high-heeled shoes standing in Oranienburgerstrasse; their wigs were very blonde or very black, and sweat left narrow runnels in their makeup.

  There was still a queue waiting outside the gallery. Eschburg carried on until he came to an art-house cinema, where he bought a ticket for the film that had just begun. He sat at the end of the back row. The sound in the cinema was loud, and the cutting of the film too fast; he couldn’t make out what was happening.

  After half an hour he left the cinema again. It was hardly any cooler. The pavements were full of people, buskers playing music outside a café, a few drunken tourists dancing.

  He walked the streets until he was tired. He stopped at a building site. It smelled of drains and shit. Eschburg looked down, and saw a fox lying among the pipes, its coat wet and full of sand. He stared at the dead fox, and then he thought the fox was staring back at him.

  20

  When Eschburg came into the studio next morning, Sofia was already at her desk.

  ‘The Maja’s Men was sold yesterday,’ she said. ‘To a Japanese. You’re rich.’ She laughed.

  The iron hooks that had held it were still in the studio wall.

  ‘It would never have happened but for you,’ he said.

  She looked happy and tired.

  ‘Shall we go away?’ he said. ‘We could rent a house on Mallorca.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  They had hardly slept for the last few nights before the exhibition. Sofia sat at the computer to search for holiday houses. Early the next day they flew out.

  They hired a car at the airport, and drove down the highway to Santanyí in the south-east of the island. The air conditioning wasn
’t working; Sofia tied a scarf over her hair and let the window down. The air was hot and salt. They stopped in Llucmajor.

  The espresso in the Café Colon was burnt, market women were talking loudly at the bar, the fruit machine was on. They bought a few things in a food store and climbed back into the car. Beyond S’Alqueria Blanca they turned off the main road and drove between narrow walls up to the house.

  That evening they toasted dark bread and ate it with olive oil, tomatoes and garlic. The sea was almost two kilometres away, but even up here it smelled of seaweed. They sat on the terrace, where they could see over the almond trees and Aleppo pines down to the plain and on to the sea. The earth was red with iron oxide.

  He was woken by the misfiring of a motorbike somewhere down on the road. Sofia was no longer lying beside him. He went into the garden. She was sitting in a deckchair near the pool.

  ‘Perhaps these are our last days,’ she said.

  He looked at her. The underwater lighting from the pool was greenish-blue.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He was awake but at the same time felt dull-witted. He wanted to go back to bed.

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t be here any more. And I’m afraid of your fantasies. Loving you is such a strain.’ She was silent, and so was Eschburg. Then she said, ‘Who are you, Sebastian?’

  Eschburg got up and went to find a bottle of water. When he came back, the light in the pool had switched itself off. He lay down with her, put one hand to the nape of her neck and closed his eyes. He thought of the colour of the ears of oats that he had rubbed apart with two fingers, and the colour of the reeds beside the boathouse. They were sharp and cut your legs.