Viv
‘This area experienced a great influx of people after the great fire of 1871,’ Sarah says, ‘when one Mrs O’Leary’s cow apparently knocked over a lantern that set a stable on fire, they say, and caused a large part of the city to go up in flames. It was an unusually dry summer and an unusually dry autumn in 1871.’
‘You speak like a book,’ Ellen says.
‘Well, then you’re also going to hear a small poem,’ Sarah says, ‘about the night of the fire.’
Men said at vespers: ‘All is well!’
In one wild night the city fell;
Fell shrines of prayer and marts of gain
Before the fiery hurricane.
On threescore spires had sunset shone,
Where ghastly sunrise looked on none.
Men clasped each other’s hands, and said:
‘The City of the West is dead!’
‘The things you know,’ Peter says, ‘and after the crash of ’29 all the white people who are able to, flee from the city and settle in the suburbs.’
‘I got it from my mother who got it from her father, they filled their conversations with rhyme, they walked around with a great reservoir of poems they had memorized about this-and-that subject,’ Sarah says to me.
‘In a way it brings conversation to a standstill,’ Peter says, ‘because when the rhyme has sounded, when the verse has spoken, there is nothing more to say about the matter.’
‘Let’s defy the power of verse and continue talking about the fire.’
Then, for some reason or other, they looked at each other in a sultry manner, so I got up and told Ellen that I was going to put her to bed. I didn’t tell them that I knew quite a few verses by heart myself, as well as entire stories by O. Henry, which Emilie read out loud to me in the months when I was her little child.
Today I saw something I believe Edward Hopper would also have seen – the façade of a Chop Suey restaurant, darkened by a century of soot. I stood on a walkway, relatively high up. The restaurant was divided into small rooms. Some people were sitting in one of them. The others were empty. Two men. One eating, the other leaning towards him. What kind of meeting was taking place? There was both a sense of a neglected existence and a sense of fatefulness to it. Maybe that fatefulness is a neglect of existence, a neglect that is nobody’s fault. It’s just too late to change. Much like the houses, the way they are filled and then emptied, for a period of time containing one life, and then another. It ended up being a dark picture taken from rather far away, and it struck me how many close-ups I take; I have to work more with distance. Distance opposes individuality, and I don’t think that I am particularly interested in the individual. But V. Smith, surely you would not go so far as to say that you only see the people on the street as representatives of social classes, would you? No, despite everything I don’t believe that. Excellent, V. Smith, then let’s leave it at that for now. Yes, because I don’t know. Yes, Time. They represent Time.
Later today I pass a construction worker standing with his big mud-smeared bottom poking right up in the air, I took the photo from so close that it takes a second to figure out what it is you are seeing.
They have Ellen in common, but I don’t know how much they think about it. There was a garden with an empty swing, and so there had to be a child, too. She was conceived for the swing. I haven’t been keen on dogs since I was a child. But I think that I live on the edge of their fire in the same way: just like a dog, I don’t always understand their signals, or what they mean by what they say. When I have to sleep everything appears in squares, framed, and I get no peace from the pictures I have taken. The people return. I don’t know if I’m searching for certain subjects, and whether as a result others might escape my attention. I would hate for that to be the case. The axis that the world rotates on: to have or not to have. Where does the money come from? Some people have sacrificed themselves so that others become wealthy, and I cannot stop noticing the result of that sacrifice – flour and leather: the mealy faces of those working indoors (I myself could have had such a face) and the leathery hands and faces of those who have spent their entire lives outdoors. In Florida I once saw a man who hid his face in his hands in exhaustion or shame – first I thought it was my father, then I thought it was my brother – I think my brother is still vagabonding and living on the streets and has become a man with bare feet in down-at-heel shoes.
Narrator
Her brother Carl rode off a long time ago on a foreign name, the name William Jesard, though it’s not that foreign – he already had the name William from Grandfather Wilhelm. So really he just poked his American middle finger into his mother’s maiden name Jaussaud and rummaged and pushed until it became Jesard. He might have already changed horses again, and then they’ll never find him. They’re not looking for him either.
‘You don’t look for someone who doesn’t want to be found,’ Maria said.
‘Then we’re rid of him,’ said Charles Senior, who in Austria was called Karl and in America Charles, yes Karl-Charles.
Viv
I rushed off as soon as I had taken the photo. And when I had gone to bed and was half asleep that night, I had a curious experience: there were two vibrating or whirring bodies secured to my body, one down by the feet and one around the forest feast region. It was not connected with the tingling I get down there when I have seen particular things at the cinema, more like something eerie, and so I tore myself free of sleep, but as soon as I was about to fall sleep again the same thing happened – two creatures were attached to my body. When I managed to wake up fully, I got up and switched on the light and kept myself awake for a while, so that I didn’t immediately slip into this sensation of being part of a double or triple exposure again. I know that it was them, my brother and my father, who latched on to me. Where meat comes from, some have sacrificed themselves – Ellen knows that now.
Narrator
What if you had just looked at Duane Michals’ double exposures for too long before you went to bed?
You are really very agitated. Maybe you should try to calm down by tidying up a little.
Viv
Yes, it’s getting crowded up here in my room, but I can’t just tidy up a little in one drawer, then I would have to tidy all of them, vacuum and scrub the floorboards, wash the curtains and all the clothes in the wardrobe. And I don’t have time for that. As for the newspapers, I have no idea where to start and where to finish, it was my intention to create an archive of:
murder, rape, kidnapping, arson, assault
political events
but I haven’t had time to clip what I wanted to. Once in a while, I photograph a few of the important newspaper pages so I don’t lose them. But the negatives are also in disarray. I no longer know what is on which sheet, and there must be close to 5,000 rolls of film now, and they take up room too. But the papers are the biggest problem.
Over here, the insane people Hitler wanted caught up in his net and burned run around in the streets until the police catch them and lock them up. I’ve noticed that their hair is always dishevelled. Twice in my life Carl has called me Sis. Today I took a photo of a short officer with a tall madman under his arm. The lunatic had rolled his trousers all the way up to his thighs, but then it was a hot day. And sure enough, his hair was dishevelled. Had I not photographed him his misery would have crushed me.
Sarah’s psychologist
I like the idea (mine) that memories are phantoms of the mind, a faint reflection of a past event that appears in you.
Peter
When Vivian talks about the bad situation of others, victims of homelessness and poverty, her voice goes dark and reproachful. It ends up sounding like she is accusing those of us who she is speaking to. She makes it sound like it is our fault. And that merely by mentioning it she is personally placing herself on the side of those less fortunate. She makes us into adversaries, even though in the strictest sense we are often in agreement. Only I think that maybe the exp
ression ‘the prisoners of starvation’ is a little wide of the mark. Sarah says that Vivian would prefer not to go to the doctor because there are so many who cannot afford to. She calls America the grave of the Occident, we talk about the genocide of Native Americans, about slavery, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about Korea, and most of all about Vietnam, until I take Sarah, who has collapsed under the weight of the miseries, by the hand and together we escape into the garden.
Sarah
Vivian does not speak very nicely to taxi drivers. She doesn’t have a driving license, and so we let her take a taxi when she has to do the grocery shopping. ‘What’s the idea?’ I hear her say. ‘Do you not have a watch or do you just not know how to tell the time, you should have been here half an hour ago,’ and then she crawls into the back seat and slams the door behind her. She buys on the cheap or is simply given bruised fruit and tired vegetables which would have been thrown out otherwise. Naturally they’re for her, not for us. She has a shelf in the fridge. When we have meat for dinner, she eats the fatty bits that the rest of us cut off because they’re not healthy. ‘You have to have something to burn off during hard times,’ she says licking her greasy fingers, and I have to admit my stomach turns. She licks the wooden spoons clean before washing them – and yes, she also licks the pots.
It makes me recall my grandfather’s as well as my father’s thrift, how we measured the water in cups before we boiled water for coffee, so that energy would not be wasted on heating a drop more than necessary, how we saved on lighting, how all the packaging was washed and saved to be used later for another purpose.
Narrator
Some time ago, when I read an article about the Uruguayan president, José Mujica, the president of frugality, who raged against overconsumption, and is now retired, I thought about your father, Sarah, because the two of them remind me of each other – it could easily be your father photographed with an old thermos outside the modest house instead of José Mujica, who donated the majority of his salary to social projects and had the presidential palace put to use for the homeless, standing in a shabby fleece jacket. (Viv would have liked him, but she died the year before he became president).
Ellen
This Sunday Miss Maier forgot to lock the door to her room when she left. She keeps the key to the padlock on a string around her neck, hidden underneath her clothes – the string is so long she can feel the key by her belly button. She keeps the string that long so that she doesn’t have to remove it from her neck when she unlocks the door. But she takes it off when she has a bath. The door was ajar. I saw it from the hall below. I went up the stairs. When I stood in front of the door, I nudged it slightly with my foot. I could see that there were a lot of newspapers inside. I nudged it a little more, even though I was really scared, and constantly listening for the sound of her moped. You couldn’t see the furniture at all. I was last in the room before she moved in, quite some time ago now. We had left a bunch of flowers on the bedside table to welcome her. There was a bed, a wardrobe and a bedside table, and now you can’t see any of them, not from out here where I’m standing. But I can see something resembling paths between the stacks of newspapers. It reminds me of a cemetery, the paths between the graves. Then I did something I shouldn’t have done. I fetched Mom. And she fetched Dad.
Sarah
Strangely enough the first thing that occurred to me at the sight of all the newspapers was the start of Rimbaud’s poem ‘L’ Éternité’: ‘Elle est retrouvée. Quoi? L’ Éternité…’
Because here it was, and stacked formidably high, eternity; every single day (I assume) of the last I don’t know how many years bundled up, time as something you can touch, and my hands went black from the printing ink; the eternity of days, the past, the lost time, the amount of life that has passed (under my nose, I’m tempted to say). Eternity. As the heathen that I am, I can only perceive eternity as the time that has been. It was frightening and pathetic. And horrifying. And in a way reassuring because time passes so quickly – I often get the sense that time is skidding away from me (I look up, and the leaves on the trees are already yellow), that I find myself in a landslide of time. It had come to a standstill.
As Peter says, it was dangerous. We have literally been living under a huge fire hazard. ‘So this is where they went, all the newspapers,’ he said afterwards, slowly. Yes, we’ve found them again! Then we heard the moped, she was on her way. Ellen got scared, she grabbed both of us and wanted to drag us away, she is big and strong, and we had to struggle a little to shake her off. For a moment, as she tugged at both of us and we fought back and collided, the three of us, we belonged together, we weren’t saying anything, it was solemn and chaotic – remember this took place on the landing outside Viv’s room, and we had to make sure none of us fell down the stairs – no, it turned into a completely mad circle dance. Suddenly I noticed that Ellen’s body was now that of a grown-up, and the words flew out of me: ‘Well, you are far too old to have a nanny.’ ‘No, Mom,’ she said, ‘no, don’t do it.’
Then Viv was in front of us.
So we let go of one another. Peter’s tie had ended up twisted around his back. It felt like she was our school-mistress and we had done something wrong. When I bent over and forced my heel back into my shoe, it was only to postpone the torrent of abuse that had to come. But no. Viv stood there for a moment, then walked past us without a word and shut the door behind her. We went back downstairs. I felt elated and put my arm around the two of them, because together we had become real.
V Smith
I am hanging by a thread. The nest defiled by their gazes, my systems disturbed. It no longer matters about my room, now I can invite them up with their boots on so they can stomp on everything and destroy it all and spit and lie in my bed. Now I go down and say: You broke the rule. It was my sole condition. Now I have to tidy everything and start over. Now I have to take my good things and leave. Now they don’t want me any longer. Now I pretend nothing happened, and it is going to continue as before. But I don’t know if they crossed the threshold and wandered down my goat paths through the room and contaminated the cleanliness with their touch, or whether they remained standing on their side of the threshold and only let their eyes wander in.
Peter
Yes, imagine, it was as though we were paralyzed after discovering that we live in a house with a hoarder of such proportions. Suddenly she seemed very foreign and peculiar to us. It was Viv who took the initiative. She came downstairs and told us she would get rid of all the papers in one go. She would drag them down and out onto the driveway immediately and make sure they were collected and driven away as soon as possible. She also said, and she sounded completely despondent: ‘There are so many things I haven’t managed to clip out,’ and I could see Sarah softening, like she was about to tell Viv that she could delay their disposal a little, but to be perfectly frank, no. I reminded them of the Collyer brothers, who had been crushed to death under the huge piles of papers they had amassed in their home. And Vivian said: ‘Only one of them was crushed. The other one sat in his chair and had died from malnutrition by the time the police arrived. But I don’t collect newspapers in the same way as them – I do it because there’s just so much I would like to clip out and keep. I can’t remember everything, nobody can remember everything they read.’ (Here her voice went up and cracked). ‘I leave what I need to remember on top of the piles so as not to forget it. But not everything can be on top.’
We offered to lend her a hand but she refused. Over the ensuing hours she ran up and down the stairs. It was quite the sight when she was finished – the piles in front of the house. Then you could see how much you had read. I have always read every paper from cover to cover, every day, all year round. I have kept myself orientated. I have tried to understand my time, from one day to the next. I have formed my opinions of it.
Vivian
Nobody is going to come here and tell me about Homer and Langley Collyer, I stood with Father that day in ’47 when t
he police forced their way into their Fifth Avenue home through a second-storey window because all the doors were completely blocked. We had walked down from 64th Street where I lived, right up to the corner of 128th Street where they lived; we had stood in front of the house many times before, because Father was somewhat obsessed with them on account of all the stories circulating about them, and all the guesswork, more or less informed, about the treasures hidden in their barricaded house. Many hours went by from the time the police crawled in through the window to the moment they turned up again with Homer’s body. We stood watching to see how they managed to manoeuvre Homer out through the second-storey window, and then carry him down the fire escape. He lay on a stretcher and was covered by a blanket, people were reluctant to move; I could see how little space he took up under the blanket. Later I read that he had only been dead for ten hours. He had died from malnutrition because Langley, in order to cure his eye disease, had placed him on a diet consisting of one hundred oranges a week. It had been many years since anyone had seen Homer outside, but Langley took good care of him, played Chopin for him, though I don’t know which of the fourteen pianos he used – one of them had been given to the family at one time by Queen Victoria – and he read out loud to him, and went out to do the shopping, and collected usable things, during the night, mostly, in the end, wearing a suit that was held together by means of safety pins. Father saw him one night! Homer lived in a small clearing between the piles of stuff. But they could not find Langley. In the days that followed, the floodgates of their palace opened, out flowed a rusted bicycle, a sawhorse, the hood of a horse-drawn carriage, a kerosene stove, a Model T Ford, all the pianos and all sorts of other musical instruments, his doctor father’s collection of medical books and jars containing foetuses and instruments, he was something so odious as a gynaecologist, and his wife in fact left him, and all the tin cans, the rubble, the pieces of wood, the magazines, the newspapers, live cats – 140 tonnes of belongings in all. After three weeks’ of clearing out, the workers stumbled upon Langley, who had fallen victim to one of his own traps which had been meant to safeguard them from burglars and authorities of all kinds. He was crushed to death by falling newspapers, and he had died only ten metres from Homer’s little nest, his body in a horrible state, hollowed out by rats. (I picture the body like the house, with paths going through it).
Vivian Page 7
