Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  After we had driven a few hundred metres he said: ‘I think I may be going to faint.’ I stopped and put my arm round him. His head fell on my shoulder. He was breathing in short gasps. With his left, sceptical eye he looked hard up into my face. A sceptical, questioning, unswerving look. Then his look became unseeing. The light which had bleached his eyes was no longer in them. He was breathing heavily.

  Anya flagged down a passing car and went back to the village to fetch help. She came back in another car. When she opened the door of our car, Ernst tried to move his feet out. It was his last instinctive movement — to be ordered, willed, neat.

  When we reached the house, the news had preceded us and the gates, which were difficult, were already open so that we could drive up to the front door. The young man who had brought Anya from the village carried Ernst indoors and upstairs over his shoulders. I walked behind to stop his head banging against the door-jambs. We laid him down on his bed. We did helpless things to occupy ourselves whilst waiting for the doctor. But even waiting for the doctor was a pretext. There was nothing to do. We massaged his feet, we fetched a hot-water bottle, we felt his pulse. I stroked his cold head. His brown hands on the white sheet, curled up but not grasping, looked quite separate from the rest of the body. They appeared cut off by his cuffs. Like the forefeet cut off from an animal found dead in the forest.

  The doctor arrived. A man of fifty. Tired, pale-faced, sweating. He wore a peasant’s suit without a tie. He was like a veterinary surgeon. ‘Hold his arm,’ he said, ‘whilst I give this injection.’ He inserted the needle finely in the vein so that the liquid should flow along it like the water along the barrel-pipe in the garden. At this moment we were alone in the room together. The doctor shook his head. ‘How old is he?’ ‘Seventy-three.’ ‘He looks older,’ he said.

  ‘He looked younger when he was alive,’ I said.

  ‘Has he had an infarctus before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He has no chance this time,’ he said.

  Lou, Anya, the three sisters and I stood around his bed. He had gone.

  Besides painting scenes from everyday life on the walls of their tombs, the Etruscans carved on the lids of their sarcophagi full-length figures representing the dead. Usually these figures are half-reclining, raised on one elbow, feet and legs relaxed as though on a couch, but head and neck alert as they gaze into the distance. Many thousands of such carvings were executed quickly and more or less according to a formula. But however stereotyped the rest of these figures, their alertness as they look into the distance is striking. Given the context, the distance is surely a temporal rather than a spatial one: the distance is the future the dead projected when alive. They look into that distance as though they could stretch out a hand and touch it.

  I can make no sarcophagus carving. But there are pages written by Ernst Fischer where it seems to me that the writer wrote adopting an equivalent stance, achieving a similar quality of expectation.

  1974

  François, Georges and Amélie: A Requiem in Three Parts

  François

  François was killed on a Saturday night. Just as it was getting dark. A car coming from behind knocked him over. The young driver of the car, who didn’t stop, was fortunate because the autopsy showed that François was drunk. Even before the result of the autopsy, nobody in the village imagined anything different. If it was Saturday night and François wasn’t at the farm, he was on one of his weekend walks and drunk. But usually, when very drunk, he was still attentive and careful about traffic.

  He was seventy-six. He owned what he was wearing, a few clothes he had left in the stable, a mouth-organ and the money which the police found tied into a plastic bag that he carried on a cord round his neck.

  Owning so little, what gave him pleasure? The mountains, women, music and red wine. This makes him sound like a bohemian — he who, even in his extravagant boasts and jokes, never left the valley of two adjacent rivers.

  Why have I put off for so long trying to describe and remember your funeral? Because after it, you were not for once in the café telling a story about the late departed? Because I’m waiting for next summer when your absence will become more acute?

  A knock on the door with your stick, and you walk in without waiting for an answer. Your creased face folded yet again into a smile. You give a long kiss to B. A smile of relish. Then through the door into the next room — as though it were beyond human ingenuity to invent a right that you wouldn’t have in this mountain chalet where you once came to be congratulated on still being alive.

  ‘There’s a man with the same name as me who has just died over there!’ You pointed across the valley to the second river far below. ‘There were those who thought it was me, me who was dead! Me!’

  You opened your mouth and spread out your arms like a jack-in-the-box and roared with laughter.

  ‘To those who are alive!’ And we clinked our glasses together. Do you remember?

  There were only a few people at the funeral, because nobody thought of putting a notice in the local paper and François was buried, not in the village, but in the small town where he was killed.

  Nobody knows what happened to the money he carried round his neck. It amounted to several hundred pounds. When he was at the farm, he hid it. You can leave your money around, he said to his boss, I won’t touch it, I have my own. He worked in exchange for his keep, not for wages, and in this way he kept his independence. He worked when he liked, he left when he liked.

  If there were any remaining members of his family left, none of them appeared. Small towns now have an exclusive deal with some under-taking firm. It’s arranged by the mayor. In exchange for this exclusivity, the firm agrees to supply one free funeral a year. In the case of a pauper, this saves the community money. The firm in question gave a free funeral to François, which didn’t include flowers.

  He had looked after animals all his life, either in the valley or on the mountain. He was used to their company. Of the company of men — not women — he was more suspicious. They didn’t all necessarily accept the authority he took upon himself.

  ‘I’ve had enough of his cows eating my grass!’ Every summer François re-started a wrangle about grazing.

  ‘It’s not even your grass!’ said a young man standing at the counter.

  ‘If I see him, I’ll punch his face in!’

  ‘You’re too old to punch anything in!’

  ‘And at your age, you know nothing. Nothing. I’ve been a shepherd for fifty years!’

  The little group followed the coffin down the street towards the cemetery. As they passed the steamed-up windows of a café, six men came out to join the procession. They left their glasses half-full on the counter for they would soon be back.

  When he was young he enjoyed dancing; later he liked to make people dance. And so whenever he heard of a celebration taking place and he was able to go, he took his mouth-organ. One Saturday night at a friend’s birthday party he lost it.

  I was there when his boss’s wife gave him another to replace the one he had lost. The three of us were sitting outside the chalet. The water was flowing into the wooden trough. There were some geese by our feet. Some parachutists had just jumped off the mountain and were drifting down to the valley. He took the mouth-organ out of its box. He examined it on every side to ensure that it included no secret which he didn’t already know. He tried holding it in his hands, as he would when playing, but without raising it to his lips. Then he put it back into its box and slipped the box into his pocket. It was no longer a present, it was his.

  The small group of us filed past the coffin. His, just as his completed life had now become his.

  Georges

  Georges was killed on a Monday when working by the bridge over the Foron. It was in the afternoon. Young Bernard came into the stable with the news at milking time the same evening. The vet was there looking at the calf who had had something wrong with its stomach since birth.

  ‘H
e’s dead!’ cried out Claire in protest. Then she addressed each person in the stable as if hoping that one of them might contradict her. ‘Jeanne, he’s dead! Theophile, he’s dead! Monsieur, he’s dead!’

  Jeanne said nothing but she clenched her jaw, and her eyes were filled with tears. The three men stood in silence without moving, the vet holding the syringe in his hand against his own arm.

  He was carried down the river before anybody could reach him and drowned.

  Bernard, who had never before been the bearer of such bad news, walked solemnly out of the stable. Then, a little later, after the vet had left, the words came.

  ‘Where is the justice?’

  ‘His arm was sticking out from the rocks, that’s how they found him.’

  ‘It takes away even your will to work.’

  ‘There were three of them unblocking a drain, and then the water broke through without any warning.’

  ‘Without any warning.’

  Georges was twenty-eight. He had been married three years before. The couple didn’t yet have any children. His body was wounded all over by the rocks against which the river had flung him. All over he was grazed and cut. But the bruises, which would have appeared, didn’t come, because he was dead.

  His body was taken home to his wife with a bandage round his head to hide the worst wounds. He was laid out on his large bed, and friends and relatives came to pay him their last respects. Each night Martine, his wife, lay beside him.

  ‘He must have been outside the blankets,’ she announced the first morning, ‘for I could feel that he was a little cold.’

  On the third day when it was time to place him in his coffin, she said: ‘Now it is time to close it, his poor corpse is beginning to smell.’

  During those three days, his death haunted the village too. It was an unnatural death which had come as brutally and unexpectedly as the mass of water which engulfed him. All the rivers and streams around the village were swollen and white with froth. Everywhere there was the sound of the water which killed him. He was too young, he carried too many hopes away with him. A thousand people came to the funeral on Thursday.

  When the coffin came out of the church, Martine was supported on either side by two of his brothers. They carried her, for her legs trailed behind her, and following the coffin, she wailed: ‘Jo-Jo, no! Jo-Jo, no!’ Georges, whom everyone knew as Jo-Jo, could not reply.

  A thousand men and women stood in silence and witnessed the chief mourner’s fight, her heaving fight, not for breath but to be able to stop breathing.

  Above the cemetery the orchards were littered with broken branches torn from the apple trees by the snow which, melting now, swelled the rivers.

  During the next two weeks Martine hoped against hope that she might have conceived just before Georges’s death. And then again the blood came.

  Amélie

  Amélie never saw a doctor in her life until four days before. And unhappily it turned out to be too late. She was eighty-two; she had congestion on both lungs and her heart gave up.

  She lived with her son who was already a widower. This son had been born when his mother was seventeen. She had not been able to marry the boy’s father, because he, the father, was only thirteen.

  Everyone knew the story of Amélie’s life. She was a woman of great endurance. She worked every day on the farm with her son until she was taken ill for the first and last time. She was, it was often said, a force of nature.

  Fifteen years after the birth of her son, she became pregnant again. Still unmarried, she was living with her mother. This was at the time of the Popular Front, Franco’s victory in Spain, the approaching holocaust. Her mother was old and her eyes were failing. And so, on this second occasion, Amélie decided to spare her mother’s feelings — or was it, too, in order to spare herself from her mother’s nagging and execration? In any case, she kept her pregnancy a secret. She was already a large woman, and she bound her belly tightly so that its rising was not very pronounced.

  On the evening when her labour began, she climbed up into the barn and there, during the night, delivered her own baby, alone. The baby was a girl, and this daughter, now a middle-aged woman, was standing against the cemetery wall whilst neighbours and friends came and offered their condolences for her mother’s death.

  On Amélie’s coffin, in the middle of the cemetery, there was a wreath, the size of a counterpane, of red and pink carnations. The colours of blood and youth.

  Before dawn, fifty years ago, Amélie took the train to the nearest town and there left her newborn daughter at the house of a woman with whom she had already come to an arrangement. The same evening she was back home, working in the stable, as if nothing had happened to either her body or heart.

  Amélie’s mother never knew that she had a grand-daughter, but there were neighbours who had been aware of Amélie’s condition and who now whispered that she had murdered her child.

  The police from the town made an official investigation. They came to cross-question Amélie, who laughed in the inspector’s face. What I’ve done is no crime, she said. You can accuse me of nothing, except — here she shut her eyes — of being too good-natured!

  As soon as her mother died, Amélie brought her daughter back home. And when her village schooling was over, she sent her daughter to a secondary school, so that she would not be condemned to being a peasant, if, by chance, she had the opportunity of choosing.

  This daughter did not take up the choice; she married locally and had two children. One of these children, now a young woman of seventeen, was at the funeral. Six months earlier she had given birth to a baby. The father had gone back to his own country — he was a pastrycook — and she had not pursued him to insist that he should marry her. She stood there now, her long hair loose on her shoulders, looking boldly and solemnly at those who had come to bury her grandmother.

  At most funerals in the village there are at least 200 mourners. And Amélie’s was no exception. They came because they respected her, because the last service they could offer her was to pray for her, because their absence might be noticed, because when, for each of them, their turn came to join the population of the village dead beneath the ground, a population which, counted over the centuries, was now that of a small city, each hoped to benefit from the same gesture of solidarity.

  Yet this afternoon the funeral was ending differently. The priest was as usual blessing the family grave into which later the coffin would be lowered. But in the cypress tree a bird was singing. Nobody knew what kind of bird it was. Its song was so loud and shrill that the priest’s prayers and the amens of the two choirboys were quite inaudible. The entire cemetery was filled with the thrills and warbling of this song.

  And there was scarcely a woman or man standing in the February sunlight, their arms folded, or their large hands clasped behind the back, who did not think: throughout the years, across the generations, a force drives on, like the sap now rising, and it is implacable and destructive and reproductive; it makes mouths open, eyes burn, hands join. (They were gazing as much at the grand-daughter as at the coffin with its red and pink flowers.) And this force condemns to work and to sacrifice, also it kills, and it sings, even at this moment is singing, and will never stop.

  1980

  Drawn to That Moment

  When my father died recently, I did several drawings of him in his coffin. Drawings of his face and head.

  There is a story about Kokoschka teaching a life class. The students were uninspired. So he spoke to the model and instructed him to pretend to collapse. When he had fallen over, Kokoschka rushed over to him, listened to his heart and announced to the shocked students that he was dead. A little afterwards the model got to his feet and resumed the pose. ‘Now draw him,’ said Kokoschka, ‘as though you were aware that he was alive and not dead!’

  One can imagine that the students, after this theatrical experience, drew with more verve. Yet to draw the truly dead involves an ever greater sense of urgency. What
you are drawing will never be seen again, by you or by anybody else. In the whole course of time past and time to come, this moment is unique: the last opportunity to draw what will never again be visible, which has occurred once and which will never reoccur.

  Because the faculty of sight is continuous, because visual categories (red, yellow, dark, thick, thin) remain constant, and because so many things appear to remain in place, one tends to forget that the visual is always the result of an unrepeatable, momentary encounter. Appearances, at any given moment, are a construction emerging from the debris of everything which has previously appeared. It is something like this that I understand in those words of Cézanne which so often come back to me: ‘One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.’

  Beside my father’s coffin I summoned such skill as I have as a draughtsman, to apply it directly to the task in hand. I say directly because often skill in drawing expresses itself as a manner, and then its application to what is being drawn is indirect. Mannerism — in the general rather than art-historical sense — comes from the need to invent urgency, to produce an ‘urgent’ drawing, instead of submitting to the urgency of what is. Here I was using my small skill to save a likeness, as a lifesaver uses his much greater skill as a swimmer to save a life. People talk of freshness of vision, of the intensity of seeing for the first time, but the intensity of seeing for the last time is, I believe, greater. Of all that I could see only the drawing would remain. I was the last ever to look on the face I was drawing. I wept whilst I strove to draw with complete objectivity.

  As I drew his mouth, his brows, his eyelids, as their specific forms emerged with lines from the whiteness of the paper, I felt the history and the experience which had made them as they were. His life was now as finite as the rectangle of paper on which I was drawing, but within it, in a way infinitely more mysterious than any drawing, his character and destiny had emerged. I was making a record and his face was already only a record of his life. Each drawing then was nothing but the site of a departure.