The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  ‘You’re still a stranger,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Eschburg. Far out to sea he saw the ships, the wandering lights, amber, agate, carnelian, and then he waited for the silence between the sentences they uttered, which was his only measurement of proximity to another human being.

  That night, the wind brought sand from Africa, and in the morning everything was covered by a thin, pale yellow layer of it.

  21

  After a week they flew back separately. Sofia had to go to Paris, Eschburg wanted to return to Berlin. He took a taxi to Linienstrasse from the airport.

  He carried his case up to the first floor. His neighbour’s door was wide open. Eschburg glanced into her apartment. It was almost empty, with only a sofa and a small table in the middle of the room.

  A woman was lying on the sofa. She was naked. Eschburg couldn’t see her face; she had laid her head over the arm of the sofa and wasn’t moving. For a moment he thought the woman was dead. He was about to go to her, but just then Senja Finks appeared in front of him. She had been standing by the door. She nodded to Eschburg, slowly and seriously. Then she placed her right hand on his chest, pushed him gently back into the hall and closed the heavy door. She did not say a word.

  Eschburg went into his apartment, unpacked his case and lay down in bed. He slept restlessly. When he woke at about five in the morning, he felt that he was not alone. The apartment was dark. He waited with his eyes closed, not moving. Suddenly he smelled cedars, and then he felt her breath on his face.

  22

  Over the next few days Eschburg cleared his studio. He painted the partitions, dealt with his post, took his cameras apart and cleaned them, phoned his publisher and the gallery owner who showed his work, got his hair cut and bought new trousers. He went for long walks in the city and its parks, visited exhibitions and sat in the café for hours without doing anything. He realized that he was taking Sofia’s absence badly.

  After ten days he flew to Paris. Sofia’s agency was holding a reception for an animal protection organization that evening, and Eschburg went straight there from the airport. The reception was in the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde. The women wore long dresses, the men dinner jackets. Eschburg was bored. In the toilets, a young man was taking a line of coke; his left earlobe was stretched out of shape by a bright green silicon earring about twenty millimetres thick. Eschburg went out of the hotel and watched the traffic.

  Sofia was able to leave at about one a.m. A driver from the agency took them to her apartment, three tiny rooms in the 10th arrondissement. The first photo that Eschburg had ever taken of her hung over her bed. He had enlarged it to 1.50 by 1.50 metres. It was the only picture in her apartment. Sofia said she was so glad he had come. Then she dropped on the bed and fell asleep at once.

  There were sliding glass doors between the bedroom and the living room. He observed Sofia through the glass, and at the same time saw his own reflection: her face on his face. He stood like that for a long time, watching her as she slept.

  After the weekend he flew back to Berlin. He went to the State Library and looked for books about Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s, who was born in England in the early nineteenth century. Galton invented the weather map and identification by fingerprints. He was convinced that all criminals had visible characteristics distinguishing them from other people. Galton had wondered for a long time how he could illustrate those characteristics, and finally he set up his camera in a London prison and had prisoners brought in. He photographed all their faces on top of each other on a single photographic plate. Galton did not know what evil would look like – it could have shown in the eyes, the foreheads, the ears or the mouths of his subjects. He was astonished when he saw the photograph for the first time: there were no unusual characteristics, and the composite face of all those criminals was a beautiful one.

  Eschburg read a lot at this time, filling a book with his notes, and drawing sketches for an installation. After four weeks he booked thirty-eight women from a theatrical agency. His stipulations were few: all the women should be about the same size, they should be between eighteen and twenty-two years old, they were to be dress size 8, and they must be prepared to have nude photographs of themselves taken.

  A frame on a wooden platform forced the models to adopt the same physical attitudes for their heads and bodies. Eschburg photographed them one by one from in front with an 8 x 10 Deardorff camera on Polaroid, exposing the photos for fifteen seconds.

  The Polaroid pictures were pale grey and looked like soft pencil drawings. The long exposure time made all inessentials disappear, with only the lines of the women’s bodies and heads remaining visible. Later, Eschburg had the Polaroids scanned, enlarged to two square metres, and printed on thin Plexiglas plates.

  A young man who usually programmed video games for a software company now came to Eschburg’s studio every morning. He set up his computer, sat in front of a high-resolution screen, and programmed the installation to Eschburg’s instructions. Eschburg got him to explain the principles of his programming. After two months he bought the young man’s computer and worked on his own for another eight months. It was a year before the installation was finished. Things were easier with Sofia at this time; they got used to one another, and Eschburg thought he had found the right rhythm for this kind of relationship.

  Finally he showed the installation to his gallerist. Eschburg left him and Sofia alone in the studio and went into the inner courtyard. He sat on the steps outside the entrance and peeled an orange, carefully separating the segments. He held the naked fruit up to the sun, turned it, looked at the individual chambers in the flesh, the white skin, the thin veins, orange, yellow and red. He wondered how far it went back, that never-ending number of decisions leading to this moment on the steps. Eschburg slowly closed his hand, the flesh of the fruit was squeezed through his fingers, juice spurted on his shirt, his hair and his face.

  23

  The entrance to Linienstrasse through the gate in front of Eschburg’s building was almost dark. One of the two street lights had been out of order for weeks. All the same, Eschburg could see Senja Finks. A stranger was clutching her throat and pushing her back against the wall. The man was stocky, the nape of his neck shaved; he had broad shoulders and wore a peaked cap. He was stabbing her in the stomach with a knife; he was fast. Eschburg ran.

  The stranger drew back to thrust for the second time. Eschburg grabbed the collar of his leather jacket and tore him away from her. The stranger stumbled and lost his balance. Even as he fell, Eschburg turned and hit him. He put all his weight into the blow and struck the stranger’s chin. The man’s jaw splintered.

  Eschburg heard the whirring behind his left ear too late. He couldn’t swerve in time. The steel tip of the cudgel hit his head. He was lucky; the angle of impact was low, and the cudgel did not smash his skull. Eschburg fell to his knees. He saw the paving stones, blue-grey with sand and moss between them. Briefly, the pattern they made intrigued him, and then his forehead hit the ground.

  Long before he opened his eyes, he knew he was in a hospital. It was the smell: the mixture of disinfectant, sickness and boiled bed linen.

  The first thing he saw was Sofia, sitting by the window with a book. She had taken off her shoes and put her feet up on the windowsill. With the light behind it, her throat looked too slender.

  Eschburg didn’t want to speak yet; he just looked at her. Finally Sofia put the book down on her lap and audibly breathed out.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. His mouth felt dry, his lips were split.

  Sofia came over and kissed him cautiously on the forehead. ‘You fell and lost consciousness. You have a hole in your head.’

  He tried to move, but the covers on the bed were stiff and heavy.

  ‘You must sleep,’ she said. ‘They’ve given you medication.’

  Eschburg felt her hand on his forehead; it was cool. He went back to sleep.

  When he next wok
e up it was dark in the room. He sat up in bed and stayed sitting until he was sure he wouldn’t feel sick. He was still wearing the hospital smock, but he was not connected to the drip now. He got up and shuffled to the bathroom. There was blood in his urine. His head was bandaged, the right hand side of his face was severely grazed, and he had a dressing over his right eyebrow. He sat on the plastic stool to brush his teeth. It was a strain.

  When he came back into the room, there was a woman sitting at the table by the window. It took Eschburg a moment to recognize Senja Finks. She was wearing a dark trouser suit, a pearl necklace and horn-rimmed glasses. Her hair fell loose over her shoulders. The trouser suit looked expensive.

  ‘I waited until your girlfriend left,’ she said.

  ‘You look different,’ said Eschburg.

  ‘People never see anything but what they want to see.’

  Cautiously, Eschburg sat on the edge of the bed. ‘You’re not injured?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

  ‘Who were those men?’

  ‘It’s been dealt with,’ said Senja Finks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shrugged her shoulders and said nothing. Eschburg lay flat on the bed. ‘Can you put the light out?’ he said. ‘It’s dazzling me.’

  Senja Finks switched the light off. She asked, ‘Have you spoken to the police?’

  ‘No,’ said Eschburg.

  ‘Then please don’t.’

  She opened the window. The air was cool and smelled of rain.

  He turned his head to her. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  She picked Eschburg’s watch up from the bedside table. ‘Nice watch. From the sixties?’ she asked.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ he said.

  She put the watch down on the table again.

  ‘Please tell me what happened,’ said Eschburg.

  ‘It’s a long story. You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Of course I want to know,’ he said.

  She looked at him for a long time. ‘Very well,’ she continued. ‘Those men were not pleasant characters, understand? They pick up girls in the villages of Ukraine and promise them a good life. Then they train the girls as prostitutes – “breaking them in”, it’s called. The girls are made available to punters, often ten or twenty men at a time, mass rapes in empty factory buildings. The police always arrive too late, and by the time they do turn up the girls and their pimps are in the next town. That scene is a world to itself; the punters pay good money, and the pimps are everywhere, in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany. They’re quick, those men, and frontiers mean nothing to them at all.’

  Senja Finks paused and grimaced. Her shirt was turning dark over her stomach area; her injury had opened up. Her breathing was shallow.

  ‘When a girl is worn out,’ said Senja Finks, ‘they cut off her hands and her head and throw her away with the garbage. Or they sell her first to a punter who whips her to death. The men record it on video and sell that later.’

  ‘That sort of thing is only for the movies,’ said Eschburg.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you won’t find it in any movie.’

  They both fell silent. Eschburg closed his eyes. His head was hurting.

  ‘Let me ask you now,’ said Senja Finks, ‘what is a girl like that to do if she’s managed to get away? If she’s stolen a great deal of money from the men, if she’s learned to survive and to kill?’

  She stood up and took the two steps over to Eschburg’s bed. She smelled of cigarettes and blood. When she leaned forward he saw that her eyes were pale green. Behind the glasses, her pupils were vertical slits.

  ‘What is guilt?’ she asked. Her voice sounded feverish.

  At close quarters, thought Eschburg, death no longer seems threatening.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  24

  Because Eschburg’s photographs aroused more press interest in Italy than anywhere else, the gallery wanted to show his new installation in Rome first. The Japanese who had bought The Maja’s Men made those two pictures available for the exhibition. The Polaroid plates, the screens, cables and computer were packed into wooden crates in Eschburg’s Linienstrasse studio and collected by a haulage firm.

  A week later Eschburg flew to Rome. He boarded an airport bus on the runway. Hundreds of starlings were circling the air traffic control tower. Later, his taxi driver told him that Rome was using hawks to try driving those birds out of the city, but the tactic wasn’t working.

  The gallery had hired the first-floor rooms of a restored seventeenth-century palazzo. Over the next few days, Eschburg made preparations for the exhibition. He hung eighteen photographs along each of the longer walls of the main hall. The Plexiglas plates were lit from behind, showing the women’s bodies in a soft, sepia tone. There was a video screen at the end of the hall. The installation was programmed so that a beamer projected one of the Polaroids on to the screen first. A quarter of a second later, the computer laid a second Polaroid over it, making a new picture out of the two of them. Then the next photo was placed on top of that picture, and so on at intervals of a quarter of a second, until the sum of them all was yet another picture. The outcome was that the women photographed by Eschburg merged to form a new woman. Her face and figure were the average of all the models, their central point. All irregularities, folds and blemishes of the skin disappeared. The artificial woman looked younger than the photographic models, her face and body were perfectly symmetrical. And she was indeed beautiful.

  Then the Plexiglas plates on the walls had their background lighting switched on, one by one, while the skin of the artificial woman on the screen grew proportionately paler. In the end the only source of light was the plasma screen. Now the artificial woman was almost white. In swift succession she was transformed into the great beauties of art history: Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus, Canova’s Paolina Borghese, Manet’s Olympia, Picasso’s Dryad and Stuck’s The Sin. After that she returned to her original form, placed her hands on her back, knelt on the floor, opened her mouth and screamed. Her figure blurred and dissolved, leaving only a white line in the middle of the otherwise black screen. Above the line, translated into all the major languages of the world, appeared Nietzsche’s words:

  Smooth lies the soul and the sea

  The line shrank to a dot, grew pale, and the screen switched itself off. The gallery was left in complete darkness for ten seconds. Then the large Polaroids began glowing gently on the walls again, and the programme started running once more.

  Eschburg was invited to appear on a talk show the afternoon before the opening; the gallery owner said they could use the publicity. Before the interview, Eschburg smoked a cigarette on a balcony outside the TV studio. The back yard of the building was full of cardboard cartons torn open, empty flower tubs, and a chair with a broken back.

  It was hot in the studio. The presenter spoke fast. An animator signed to the audience, letting them know when to clap. Suddenly the presenter jumped up, flung his arms in the air, and called something out to the spectators, who laughed. The gallery owner had said that the presenter had won a television prize for his ‘infectiously human’ talk show.

  Eschburg saw Sofia. She was sitting in the front row of the audience; he could hardly make out her face.

  Then the studio fell silent; the spectators were staring at Eschburg, who seemed to have missed something. Now the presenter was sitting beside him again. He wore a striped yellow and white shirt, with the stripes on the breast pocket mismatched by half a centimetre. Eschburg forced himself not to look at it. The illumination from the floodlights was refracted by a mote of dust on the presenter’s rimless glasses.

  Eschburg thought of the note he had written in the dark last night. He didn’t know just what he had said in it, but he believed it had been important.

  Everyone was still waiting. Eschburg smiled because he didn’t know what else to do. He wished all this would stop.

&nbs
p; At last the presenter was speaking again, clapping his hands once more and turning back to the cameras. Now Eschburg saw a painting on a screen. He didn’t understand what the picture had to do with his installation. He heard the woman interpreter’s voice; it sounded metallic in the tiny receiver in his ear. ‘When is an installation finished?’ she was asking. ‘When is it finished?’

  ‘When it’s right,’ Eschburg said at last.

  The presenter shouted something at the cameras again; the interpreter didn’t translate it. The audience applauded.

  At last it was over and the big floodlights were switched off. A sound technician took the microphone off Eschburg’s jacket; the hairs on the back of his hand brushed past Eschburg’s chin. The presenter was signing autographs for the spectators. He turned round, shook Eschburg’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder. Sofia came up on the stage.

  At the hotel, Eschburg got under the shower at once. The water tasted of chlorine. He stepped out on to the small balcony with only a towel round his waist. Down in the square a fat man was laughing; he wore a brightly coloured sweatshirt with the words International Golf Team embroidered right across its back. He was eating something out of a bag. His wife had no neck.

  Eschburg went back into the room and dressed. He found the note he had written last night in a pocket of his jacket. He unfolded it, but the paper was blank.

  The exhibition opened the next evening. The models stood under their photographs. Eschburg answered questions from journalists, he talked to guests, art collectors, the ambassador and a State Secretary for Culture.