As a child it seemed incomprehensible to me that something could happen when I wasn’t there to see it. That now serves as a kind of solace in relation to death; I mean that one day I’ll no longer be able to see what’s taking place, but all the same so much has taken place that I haven’t seen that I’m used to it, so it’s probably not that bad.
I thought about André Kertész’s photographs of pigeons, in Paris and in New York – well it doesn’t matter where because all pigeons look the same. It is difficult from his photographs to determine what are pigeons and what are their shadows, all just dark voraciousness. In one picture there is a man sitting on a bench with his back turned, and the pigeons (and their shadows) draw closer to him. I can’t look at a bird without thinking that if I were dead it would hop on top of me and hack into me in that uncomfortably inattentive bird-like manner, every other moment looking up and glancing around, strips of flesh dangling from its beak, then another hack, look up, as though it didn’t give a damn about the desecration of a body, as though it were just something it did in the interim, whilst vigilantly surveilling its surroundings. I do realize that it’s keeping an eye out for enemies. But to simply be eaten in that absent-minded manner!
Sarah
Ellen and Viv were standing in the doorway about to go out when Ellen said to me: ‘You don’t like the Ellen who goes for walks with Miss Maier. When we get home, you’ll be gone.’
‘Why, that’s not true, Ellen,’ I said. ‘I was the one who wanted Miss Maier to come live with us and take care of you.’
‘Well, then I want to tie you up.’
‘Balderdash,’ Viv said and grabbed Ellen’s hand.
‘You’re welcome to tie me up,’ I said, and so she ran out to the garden and fetched her skipping rope and tied me to the chair where I sat with a frightful tangle of knots. Meanwhile, Viv stood in her coat shaking her head: ‘Now I really have seen everything!’ she said.
I wriggled free after they had left, but I was sure to be in position under my bonds when they came back. I wanted to be someone who could be counted on.
When they returned home and I was set free (officially), Viv said: ‘I’ve spoken to Ellen. This won’t happen again.’
The other day when I got home from The Paper, Viv had dragged Ellen’s old stroller out of the garage and stood in the driveway wiping it down with a cloth. She says that Ellen walks so slowly that it would be easier to wheel her around.
‘Viv,’ I said, ‘she’s six years old! You’ll just have to walk a little slower.’
She got so angry that her entire body was shaking. ‘My name’s Vivian,’ she said, then grabbed the pushchair and gave it a proper shove, sending it careening into the middle of the road, but she certainly didn’t care, she simply turned her back to me and stormed into the house. I fetched the pushchair myself and put it away. When we met in the kitchen later, her upper lip curled towards her nose in a kind of smile, and I said: ‘That’s quite a temper you have.’ And she was clearly used to hearing that a lot. Maybe we should have cleared part of the basement for her instead of placing her at the top, I’m afraid that the elevated position has given her delusions of grandeur. She still hasn’t put out any of the old newspapers by the garbage can, but I suppose she hardly gets a chance to read them. I don’t know if I should feel guilty about her having such a long workday, but we’re enjoying our nights out. At times I can almost see Peter as a stranger again, though I did have a funny dream: I became aware that I was having relations with the young apprentice, which came as a surprise to me. Well, one morning I stepped into the editorial office and saw that there were signs with our names by our seats just like there were on all the children’s desks on Ellen’s first day of school. I went over to my seat and turned my sign around: it read Ped-Ophelia. That was my name now. I turned around and found Peter standing behind me with what I can only characterize as a sardonic smile. ‘You shouldered that well,’ he said. And I replied: ‘Well, I do come from the city of Big Shoulders’:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders
Clearly, I didn’t tell Viv about my dream otherwise she would have dropped dead by the stove – but I did teach her Carl Sandburg’s poem, which was right up her alley. Later I discovered that she had taught it to Ellen, and that Peter, on hearing her recite it, had commented in a didactic tone: ‘That was in 1914, that’s no longer the case.’
Peter
Building worlds where life can take place, for however long it lasts – I’m speaking of decorating the home and landscaping the garden. For periods it has taken up so much time that I have thought that what should be the background (for our lives, for us) has become the foreground. I look at the new carpet and think: does it represent me? And the flowerpots on the patio: are they there in order to say something about me? I assume that we get rid of the ugly things so that they don’t point back to us. Having bad taste, that’s almost worse than being a stupid pig. Presumably I take it for granted that we decorate things for the sake of others, not for our own. Maybe because I trudge through my home with blinders on, and if I spot something I don’t like, I just position myself so that it is out of my field of vision.
Viv
I’m off work. The world is open to me. Resting against my stomach is the house which is briefly inhabited by various people. They are mute. The only thing you know about them is what you can see. I’m in the silence business. I’m in that business because it is silent.
Narrator
She shoots from the stomach. Taken from below and pointing upwards. Endowing the people she captures with a certain magnitude. Making even the bums appear somewhat majestic, at least those that are still able to stand.
Viv
Some like having their picture taken, others don’t. Many don’t even realize it. But I take them whether they like it or not.
This is the only thing in the world that never makes me impatient. With this I can solve any problems that arise. There is nothing to despair over, because I know what I am going to do; I don’t always know straight away, but it’s just a matter of keeping at it for long enough. The vacuum cleaner, on the other hand, which is defective, can make me beside myself (I don’t like asking Sarah why one minute it is sucking and the next spitting everything out), and I have to struggle with the filthy beast day-in and day-out. But there is one similarity: as a menial I ought to be invisible and go largely unnoticed in the streets so I can take my pictures in peace.
It’s true that I quickly get very angry when people throw stones in my path, so that I can’t move at the tempo that suits me – that’s the only bad thing about children, that they walk so slowly. I feel sorry for dogs whose owners force them to walk glued to their leg so that they can’t move at their natural tempo, which is generally at a gallop, just like me.
Narrator
What about the children and their natural tempo?
Viv
Ah-bah, I’m teaching the Snails to keep up. How grimy it is when you get outside of Wilmette! In this part of the city the streets are full of garbage and rats. Even that which once was alive is simply shoved down the gutter.
Narrator
One night in ’66 you can see Martin Luther King on TV shovelling piles of garbage that have accumulated in one of the lanes in the city’s South Side. The next day Mayor Daley sends the sanitation workers out to clear garbage in that part of town. By repeatedly responding promptly and tangibly to King’s requests he avoids taking a stand on what King’s campaign in Chicago in ’66 is all about: racial discrimination. Another example is the ‘Hydrant Riots’. The summer of ’66 was hot. In the summertime, the residents were in the habit of opening the fire hydrants and letting the children splash in the water. That summer, municipal workers enter several of the black neighbourhoods and turn off the hydrants, and fighti
ng breaks out between workers and black residents. The police get involved, and the fighting intensifies. Daley asks King what he would advise him to do, and because he is worried about the immediate situation, he simply urges Daley to turn on the fire hydrants again and give African Americans safe access to swimming pools in white areas. And so Daley does. He has an entire lake at his disposal. He opened the hydrants and had sprinklers connected, and he had portable swimming pools driven into the black areas. The water gushed. ‘They hope we grow gills and swim away,’ one of the civil rights advocates said.
Viv
Here lies a cat, made flat by death, partially covered by a flyer and withered leaves. It gave me an idea. When I came home, I buttoned my blue velvet coat over a white blouse so that the very top could be seen, and spread the coat out on the patio with the arms out to the side and placed my red hat above the collar, so that empty, flat Viv lay there looking tired and dusty. I continued for some time using flatness. My shadow served well here. I felt my way along by placing leaves as the vital organs in the shadow’s chest, heart and lungs. At times it just looked like extra seasoning.
I also allow my shadow to fall upon people and take photographs with my shadow elbows jutting out. I become part of their world without them knowing it. I have lowered myself into their lives.
Narrator
Vivian did not begin in earnest (that is to say incessantly wherever she stood, taking along first her Brownie later her Rolleiflex in one edition and then another edition and soon several around the neck at one time and later still other types of cameras, I don’t want to go into detail with the technical side, don’t expect words like exposure time, darkroom and contact sheet from my mouth, at least not very often – all the same, it was fascinating to read Man Ray’s description of his conduct in the darkroom, how he used materials whose expiry date had long since passed and broke all the rules of developing, and how from that came extraordinary results) to take photographs until the late forties, when she stopped seeing her father/when he stopped seeing his children/when father and children stopped contacting one another. Was that why? Father is gone, in future I (Viv that is) am going to preserve everything of significance that crosses my path. I have it in the can, my lifetime suitcase dangling down by my navel, my leather animal, my Rollei. It has been made into mine. It cannot disappear from me.
(It is my task to find plausible explanations, motives, reasons, it is my excuse to exist).
Viv
That was when the grandmothers died.
Ellen
When we are at the beach in Gillson Park that Miss Maier and I love so much that we’re there almost every day, she keeps her clothes on, including the coat if it’s windy, but she has her legs out (with hair she calls fur). Then she stands by the shore watching me and looking like a bird, taller than normal because I am floating on the lake looking up at the sky with her face on it.
‘Why do you take photographs?’
‘It clears my mind of everything else.’
‘But so many?’
‘It’s better to look outwards than inwards.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘The world is more interesting than my brain.’
‘You do it constantly.’
‘I’m constantly spotting something.’
‘Can I too?’
I can, and so can Joan, so we photographed Miss Maier and one another in that amusing world.
‘Careful careful’ she shouted every time we passed each other her Rollei.
When I get out of the water, and she towels me dry, we pretend I’m a meal she is cooking, and that she’s mixing in all kinds of things. I’m also the pot, and every time she rubs me with the towel, we take turns shouting out the new ingredients she pours in: flour, salt, forcemeat, horse droppings, grass, tongues and pepper, and then she stirs my hair one last time. The meal is finished, I’m dry.
Narrator
I’ve never been to Chicago – I’m hindered by my handicap which I am not going to bore anyone with – but I’ve bought a second-hand laminated copy of Streetwise Chicago on Amazon, which doesn’t get crumpled or tatty, and it folds up, and I have found both Highland Park and Wilmette (and I also stumbled across the Obama’s Home, but I can’t find Gillson Park in Wilmette), and followed Vivian on the routes she took to take photographs when she left the suburbs: around The Loop, to Maxwell Street Market (on Sundays) and down wild, dangerous Madison Street.
It has never been easier to write about places you have never visited, one click and you soar above people’s houses, though there are many pitfalls and you can really put your foot in it, place mountains where it’s flat and things like that, which is why it’s best to refrain from descriptions. And by and large I’ve done that, too. I say ‘Chicago’, and then it must be Chicago.
It’s 1968, the Vietnam War is raging, there are violent race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, thousands of African Americans pour out onto the streets of Chicago’s West and South Side looting shops and setting buildings on fire, nearly every building on a three-kilometre stretch of Madison Street is destroyed, the West Side looks like a war zone, eleven people are killed, hundreds lose their shops and over a thousand people are made homeless. Viv arrived a couple of days after the rioting and took photos of the devastated neighbourhoods and the national guard patrolling the streets.
Vivian is totally absorbed by Robert F. Kennedy’s election campaign, and since she is thousands of kilometres from the Democratic primaries, she has to document them by photographing the front pages of newspapers that have to do with Kennedy’s campaign – and in the end, front pages that have to do with his murder.
Viv
The elephant, the largest and noblest of all the stuffed animals, is RFK, and Ellen has placed it on a toy wagon that she slowly pulls down towards the play house that is St Patrick’s Cathedral; Sarah and I form the procession, the slow tempo all the way through the garden makes me cry (I can’t stand the tempo, and I can’t bear that he is dead, either), which pleases Ellen to no end because she saw a lot of people crying on TV, even though she doesn’t understand how you can cry over someone you don’t know.
Narrator
The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago from 26 to 29 August in 1968 with the purpose of nominating a presidential candidate, the party is divided as regards the Vietnam War, Vice President Hubert Humphrey is nominated (and later loses to Nixon). At the same time as the delegates arrive in the city, thousands of activists pour in, and again violent riots and clashes break out between anti-war protestors and the police. The press calls it the Battle of Chicago. Mayor Daley has armed the city to the teeth and ordered the police to shoot-to-kill arsonists and shoot-to-maim looters. There has not been such a heavy military presence in an American city since the Civil War. Miraculously nobody is killed, but the tear gas flows, and the fighting swells in the streets so that people are pushed through shop windows.
Vivian takes Ellen with her to Grant Park to photograph the protestors, but Ellen gets so scared of the police and the large crowds – ‘Can you get shot buying ice cream?’ – that they have to return home.
From that day:
Officers lined up
A small sharp-featured woman, elegant as a silhouette, teasing an officer with no appreciation for it
Pigs kill (graffiti on a wall)
Young protestors, they’re lying on the grass in the park, they’re sleeping, they’re reading the paper
Sarah
I don’t know why I didn’t dismiss her, even though what she did was appalling, and according to Ellen she has done it before. When I asked why she did it, she replied that these interminable meals made her lose her patience, because she longs to set off, out in the world. By which she means the streets. And she cannot tolerate throwing away food. She thinks it is wrong when there are so many poor people. But Ellen is fat, I said, even though Ellen was sitting right there, and I regretted it afterwards – obvi
ously I should have had that conversation when Ellen was not present, but I was honestly so shaken that I didn’t think about it. She doesn’t have to eat everything, that’s how excess weight is established, you destroy her ability to notice when she is full, I said. She herself stood and was so long, lean and flat underneath her loose clothing. It is coercion, I said, my child is not to be treated like that. Nobody should be treated like that. She nodded, and then she did what she often does when encountering opposition – she slipped away. That’s how I would describe it: she retreats inside herself even though she is standing right next to me. She slipped away, and then marched out of the children’s bedroom with her lengthy strides and swinging arms. There was tomato soup and dumplings everywhere. Ellen had stopped crying, she sat sucking on her hair, she always has to have something or other in her mouth. Something went very wrong in the oral phase – she never left it – maybe I should have nursed her a little longer. Viv gives her far too many candies. If she didn’t get so many sweets over the course of the day, she would probably eat her meals quicker.
The door was open, and, when I walked past out in the hallway, I saw her standing bent over Ellen, and I didn’t understand what was going on. She had practically forced Ellen’s head into her armpit – I think I must have thought that Ellen had maybe got something in her eye and went in to see if I could help. They didn’t hear me come in – not until I stepped into the room did I see that she held Ellen by the nose and was forcing a spoon into her mouth. Ellen’s head rocked wildly, and she was kicking out with her feet. When Viv heard me, she let go, and Ellen opened her mouth and threw up and coughed and cried. Instead of going directly up to her room, Viv first availed herself of our bathroom, she let the water run for a long time, she probably gave her hands a proper going-over. In fact, I know she did, because the nail-brush was wet. I feel like a spy. I suppress my urge to open the door to her room with my spare key when she is not home. This curiosity regarding her life gives me a feeling of inferiority, and that was also why I didn’t dismiss her; I feel in a way that she is above me. It’s ridiculous – I’m her employer, and she is completely dependent on me and the envelope I give her at the end of the month. A little later I saw her walk past in the street, with the box on her stomach.
Vivian Page 3
