Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  —You mean you’re just going to turn it loose?

  —In a manner of speaking.

  Peter is stunned. He cannot see the artifice in a photo where the subject just stands there. He takes his place in the middle of the processional, pensive and shattered. He studies his shoes, wondering how he ever came to find the style attractive. The photographer waits for him to emerge from his funk and look up, but he does not. He remains the reticent fellow in the police lineup, guilty by virtue of looking away.

  —Jawbone, would you mind much not sulking and giving the audience some small odds of seeing your features?

  —Who’s sulking? And I thought you didn’t want me to pose.

  Adolphe, suddenly ashen, adds:

  —And what do you mean, audience?

  Hubert alone remains unperturbed. He plays with his cigarette as if he has just invented smoking. His eyebrows go up and down in infant calisthenics. He parries with his cane, knocking at the others’ ankles the way he torments captured squirrels.

  The photographer rushes to assure Adolphe, who has taken a dose of stage fright, that the photograph will not go into any large shows; it will serve primarily as a scientific document, part of a growing archive of information, a collection of different categories of social classes, facial types, and economic roles spanning the whole hierarchy of man in the newborn century. The faces of Hubert, Peter, and Adolphe—even this trivial scene of young men on their way to the May Fair—will fill a small but significant gap in the project.

  The boys listen in silence, awed by the sweeping undertaking. Hubert blurts out a question, and is reassured that revolutionaries are given a special section in the catalog all to themselves, and that the poor worker is positively highlighted. The scope and cleanliness of the plan appeal to Adolphe, and he unconsciously draws himself taller in a posture of Teutonic severity. He has a new respect for the eccentric bicyclist, whose hands push back, bits at a time, the general loss of this forgetting world.

  The man’s plan makes Peter think of maps. Photographing society reminds him of making maps of unknown terrain. It provides a key, a way of looking over a place without having to go there. This man’s plan—to build up a document of categories and subcategories, even more precise and encompassing with each new photo—is like increasing the scale of the map. One mile to the inch is clearly better than two to the inch: more detail, and truer to the real estate. Perhaps this fellow on the bicycle, as incurable as he is about posing, might, by taking enough photos, improve the map of Man of the Twentieth Century to the scale of a few hundred yards to the inch, a few hundred faces to the photo.

  But Peter does not take this hope of increasing exactness to its logical conclusion. A map of one inch to the inch, which cannot be spread without covering the countryside, shows nothing that the place itself does not show just as well. In order for this encyclopedia to become completely authentic, it would have to include a print of every living face, an impossibly cumbersome file and one replaced nicely by the faces themselves.

  Nor does it occur to any of these four, who between them can boast only twenty years of schooling, that the subject matter of the project—Man of the Twentieth Century—will accelerate numerically, far outstripping any attempt to document it. The undertaking is doomed to the abstraction of the frame, as is this moment on the road.

  —You see, the plate is more for science than for celebrity. You need have no fear; your parents will not punish you for becoming famous. Oh, perhaps you’ll hang in a museum in a hundred years! But for now, strictly the archives. But if you fellows would like to meet me here next Sunday, we can arrange about a print for you.

  Hubert demands to know how that is possible. Would they have to share the photo with the archive, say on an every-other-week basis? If so, they should be given a substantial discount toward purchase.

  The photographer explains that an infinite number of prints, all unique in some small way, can be pulled from the original plate without harming the image. The boys’ imaginations hang on that tremendous potential—an effortless, machine-run burgeoning, free from the uncertainties of the human hand, a godly process that, with the switch of a few dispassionate levers, creates cheap and available doubles, not just of people but of moments, this moment. One could paper the world with a moment that had not yet even been a moment until the camera ripped it out of time and printed it.

  Aware of passing a threshold, the technology of outdoor photography, the boys automatically bring themselves into an agreement of postures—the decorum and propriety of churchgoing, with the camera serving for altar. Choosing this instant as his proper subject, while the boys radiate a knowledge of his project, the photographer secretly opens the shutter.

  Through long practice, he has developed the ability to see almost as well as the lens, to previsualize what will appear on the developing-out plate. He knows instantly that this one is good, that the three farmers, in their suits saved for Sundays and holidays, here in the vast expanse of Westerwald nothingness, have dropped their obstinate masks of individuality and taken up the more serious work of the tribe, the pre-posed, awake look of being outside time. This, the taker of the image sees; the young farmers, interrupted on their way to a dance, see something else altogether.

  For that haunted, blessed look of innocence could not have come into their eyes without benefit of vision. They become aware of the open lens, of light streaming from them into the box, drawing with it all memory of the moment and of their own outwardness. All three see it for the briefest interval hovering above and just beyond the photographer’s shoulders: the third party, a vision of billions. They see a movie, played out instantly on an infinitesimal screen, of machine-inflicted suffering on a scale incomprehensible to these three rustics. Then, without any time passing, the lens opens as a clear portal, and they look past the photographer on countless people who, museumgoing, file by clinically, uncomprehending, curious.

  This is the vision the lens arrests; it explains the quality in the subjects’ eyes that so haunts and transcends. Their look fixes on the numbers and suffering of future viewers. They look forward—and back.

  When the photographer caps the lens and emits a satisfied shout, the boys’ vision of masses dissipates. Tacitly, they agree not to speak of what they have just seen; they make no mention or look or questioning sign. In keeping it to themselves, they hope to lose it altogether by the time they get to the fair.

  Hubert is first to shake off the sight of collective horror. He picks up a piece of chick-pea gravel and attempts to brain a sparrow. Peter feels a new camaraderie with the photographer now that the image is done. He vows to pick another fight with the man, and this time let him win.

  The photographer begins to pack away his gear, urging the boys on to the May dance but reminding them of next Sunday’s appointment. Still, the boys dawdle, reluctant to remove themselves from this scene of great tragedy. They kick about. Talk springs up: politics, current events, the idle rumors of war people use to kill time. Adolphe takes offense; the photographer puts a question to him—the Kaiser’s 800,000—the sandy irritant that will stay with Adolphe until the end, producing a bright and terrible pearl.

  The photographer gathers up his sample portrait gallery from where it lies spread out by the roadside. He packs the prints snugly on his bicycle. Peter watches with disdain.

  —Tell me again, Mr. Plato, why is it that an obviously well-off fellow like yourself doesn’t own an auto?

  The same ironic smile comes to the photographer as when he told the polemical boy to avoid organizations.

  —A car is for getting from start to finish as quickly as possible. But I earn a living by pointing out what happens between.

  The fellow mounts his portable workshop and pedals back along the muddy road, dipping and snaking through the hidden, dead spots of the Westerwald, but managing always to stay threaded, tethered to the spire of Cologne Cathedral. The three farmers watch him disappear. No waving; only the increasing ocean of
solitude, the fallow, reticent fields.

  It falls to Peter to rouse the boys from despondence back to the material world. He accomplishes this by the time-honored technique of insults and practical jokes.

  —Hu-ub, Hubie. Your face looks like something we trained the dog not to do indoors. A-dol-phe. You think Alicia will want to tinker around?

  And so on, every few hundred meters.

  —A-dol-phe. No Alicia will want to dance with someone with a big spat of mud on his jacket tails.

  Adolphe turns two complete rotations to see the spot, Peter goading him that it is just out of sight. Hubert, curious, adds his own erratic orbit: a solar system out of kilter. In a leap of insight, Adolphe takes off his coat and checks it in front of his face. He is furious at finding no spot. He restores the coat in silent shame. A moment later, he fears that the game might have been a setup; panicked, he checks his billfold. It is there. All is right in the empire.

  The boys stray close enough to the fair to hear, carrying across the still tempera of May, the subdued sounds of a village celebration. Peter teases Adolphe a final time about the locals’ quaintness, how most of them are just now hearing that a new century began fourteen years ago. Hubert scowls, showing the pachyderm skin of progeria, premature aging. The curls of hair, the forehead stretched to reach from temple to temple, prove how close innocence lies to violence.

  —Luden, Luden. Burn it down and redistribute the wealth.

  —An equal handful of cinders to everyone, eh, Hub?

  The infant old man grins: a patted puppy. He is thinking about something the photographer said: until politics becomes a science, it will remain bloody. But the boy misunderstands; he takes this as a sanction. For the first time, a strawberry birthmark across the bridge of his nose becomes evident.

  He asks Peter once more about the pronunciation of the Russian word “Soviet.” He cannot accept that Peter—almost his brother—and Will, the brickmaker—almost his father—disagree on the pronunciation of this central word. He is divided between these two authorities.

  The boys walk in silence, remembering the moment of the photograph. They keep to one side of the wheel ruts or the other; the road there is easier on their shoes. They resolve to pool their money and keep the appointment with the photographer next Sunday, buy a keepsake of a world that will not survive the next three months.

  They walk in single file; Peter again leads. Adolphe adjusts his hat with an eye to the other’s angle: now too sober, now too cocked. Hubert lags behind, digging, with his well-worn heels, drainage canals and earthworks in the standing pools.

  An observer coming over the western rise and spotting them unnoticed would have the distinct impression—there, the three of them in black suits, dragging their feet, keeping a morose silence—that they formed a tributary feeding into a swollen funeral river, instead of the truth: three boys walk down a muddy road to the first celebration of spring.

  This near, the music issuing from the copse that hides the May dance is plainly a brass band. Adolphe glances pointedly at Peter, winning the argument. The taller, fuller figure—half mirror of the eye arch and equine nose—returns an impish look, whining:

  —It’s not Vienna after all, Adolphe. You promised you would take us to Vienna.

  A bass drum followed by a tuba blast shakes the walking sleep from Adolphe. The violence of the downbeat stirs up fresh in his mind the already forgotten vision of catastrophe over the photographer’s shoulders. Adolphe stops, one foot off the road, brought to a standstill by the shock of memory: countless people on the far side of the frame. He sees it again, as at the moment of exposure—a night scene whose contours stand out briefly in the flash of a phosphor pan.

  There will be a terrible birth, and then another: violent obstetrics. He will marry Alicia, exercise his military privilege, but he will have no harvest. He will come back after a long while to find the house burned, the photo albums destroyed. But before Adolphe has the power to call out, the print of his vision fades as quickly as the original. He will not see it again.

  Adolphe can take no step toward the dance, so paralyzing a fear has come over him on the empty fields. He cannot even check inside his coat to see if the thief has left him his billfold. The fear comes on him from nowhere, from a memory. He fears neither the passing of the old order nor his own foreseen death, but something much more trivial.

  —Peter . . .

  The jaunty, arrogant figure leading the parade freezes too. He recognizes in the tone an allusion to the shared vision of a moment before. He hopes the prim one will talk no more explicitly about it. He squeezes shut his eyes.

  —Eh?

  —Peter, will we be hurt?

  There it is; the crisis Peter hoped to avoid. He laughs and gives a goosestep.

  —Sliced down the middle.

  He tries to laugh again, but his voice is strained. He would like to tell his soon-to-be brothers that he loves them, but it would only alarm them by being too out of character. The fear will pass momentarily; if he waits it out and plays dumb, he will save them the embarrassing effusion.

  —Hurt?

  Hubert speaks. He stands in a puddle, one lace untied. He looks, in his sadistic innocence, for all the world like the stone carving of a saint on a northern cathedral. A blessed saint of muddy puddles and complicity.

  —Hurt, you say? What of it?

  Three figures walk down a muddy road toward evening, two young, one an indeterminate age. The sun sits late in the sky, laying down long, weak lines of uncertain light. The black material of their suits scuds up at the elbows as the figures swing their arms. All three carry canes, though none needs them. Canes are the height of fashion this year, though they will soon be scorned as the props of the limping old.

  The music of the dance is almost upon them. The dance is almost upon them. The lead figure keeps the parade moving. He swings his cane, cups his hand around a dark kerchief, and pushes his hat to a rakish angle. He keeps his companions moving with threatening good humor.

  Just outside the fair, the music stops. The brass band is between numbers, or the notes have been swallowed up, fallen into a hidden ravine in the changeable Westerwald landscape. A look of ill-concealed horror crosses the three faces, then passes into nervous laughter. To fill the oppressive silence, to commit the moment to memory, the lead figure begins to sing:

  —Carrots and onions. If my mother had served up meat, I might never have left home.

  Then, by association, another tune:

  —How long you’ve been away from me. Come home, come home, come home.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Arrival at the Dance

  To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

  —Walter Benjamin

  In a dark booth at the back of The Trading Floor, Mays spread out his penny rolls on the table and hoped the place did not insist on U.S. legal tender. Even if he still had a job, he would never have been able to swing a meal there, much less afford the Bullock-style gratiuties. He had wrapped three Ford cents in a tissue and given it to the dapper host who welcomed and sat him.

  But when the costumed fellow returned to his post, the sound of metal rolling about The Trading Floor indicated the tip had not met with approval. The fellow had not looked closely enough at the coins to see the imperfection that made them valuable. The divergences from the original were after all slight: just the profile and the motto.

  Mays would have been better off, if he intended to spend the Ford Cents, cashing them in at a coin dealer in the nearby financial district. But he had gone directly from South Station to the restaurant on hitting town, not even stopping at his place to drop off his things. In an extreme hurry to arrive at his one, last, open channel to the past, he jogged from the train to The Trading Floor, baggage and all.

  He played with the penny rolls until awakened by a discreet, dry cough. The headwaiter stood at the side of his table, introducing his waitress
: his favorite Edwardian after Bernhardt. Seeing Alison again in the flesh, he even felt inclined to rerank these top two. Throwing decorum to the pit, he gave in to the urge that had possessed him when first dining here with Bullock. The stuffy fellow introduced Miss Stark, and Mays blurted out:

  —Pleased to meet you, my dear, I’m sure.

  Neither costumed figure so much as twitched a muscle. Alison looked blankly down at the linen she was spreading. Mays had the sickening feeling that she did not recognize him. Her face showed so perfect a void that he began to wonder if her features did, indeed, match the woman he’d met only days before.

  The closer he looked, the more discrepancies between print and original he found. As in the child’s game of “Find the Differences,” two images side by side, so identical at first glance, reveal, with study, that they have nothing in common.

  With the dry cough that prefaced his every action, the headwaiter withdrew. The alabaster Miss Stark continued to lay out the table setting. Just as Mays was about to convince himself that he’d never seen this woman before, she said, in affected cockney:

  —Let’s see: fork on the right, knife and spoon on the left? Or is it knife on the right, fork and spoon . . . oh screw it. You can do this your mizmo.

  A sudden release shot through Mays’s chest. He spared the woman a public display of affection, confining himself to reaching out and feeling her up. She laughed, fended him off, and continued setting.

  —So you’re rich now?

  —In one word, not exactly.

  Alison found the disclosure satisfying, even amusing. But she did not look at him or break stride in preparing the table. Her features were once again her own. As at every other moment of his life when a feeling of well-being overcame him, Mays went rigidly and helplessly inarticulate.

  —So . . . how are you?

  —Not bad in the clinch, as I hope you take the opportunity to discover.

  —Listen. I’d like to talk to your friend Arkady. Something to ask him.