Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  He heard their footsteps long before he saw them. It took them forever to reach his booth, like in some drawn-out horror flick, although one of the least horrible parts. The two women were talking, Amelia was carrying a cardboard office-supply box, the kind made to hold five reams of copy paper. Twenty-five hundred blank sheets that had meaning, or perhaps none – in a box rather like the ones some teachers filled with class materials, booklets, photocopies. Paul felt a sudden urge to yank the box out of her hands and run with it, as if digging through its contents could offer him some hint of the future that might otherwise remain painfully out of reach. Impulsively he hid (not again! he thought), sliding down in the sentry booth, and waited ages, pins and needles in his legs, until he was sure they were gone. Mercifully, they hadn’t seen him.

  Yet that night, at the hotel, the front-desk phone rang, late but not that late, some time around ten or eleven, and it was Amelia Dehr, suggesting that he come up and eat with her. At first, Paul said nothing. His instinct was to hang up. Then he found his words and said that he was sorry, but he couldn’t leave the desk. Amelia said, Of course, gracious but not fooled, perfectly aware that, in fact, he left his desk all the time for any excuse at all and sometimes even without one. In that case, she said, I’ll come on down.

  And in this way Paul and Amelia became friends – if that’s what they were.

  2

  After that, Paul kept waiting in the underground car park for the German car to reappear. He didn’t really expect to see it again, and when he did, he suspected it had appeared by sheer force of will, of desire. Once she was done parking, Amelia Dehr stayed in the car for a long while. Far too long, really. The camera’s angle kept him from seeing much, but he sensed that she was crying. He suspected that she was punching the steering wheel, struggling, trying to escape something inescapable. Staring through his small screen at the car no one had got out of, Paul felt a growing fear that he thought he had buried for good. A childish fear that rose up in him like sap. His world was now reduced to a rectangle that Amelia Dehr, by not stepping out of the car, stayed within; a frozen image on the screen that stayed unchanged. When the car door finally opened partway, he knew his weakness. He couldn’t look at the person stepping out of the car, the person who would be his Amelia but would not be; would be some other version of her; and he knew just as well that he could not look away. He had no choice but to look and not to look at the same time. My heart’s going to explode, Paul thought. My eyes are going to burst. She stepped out of the car, one long leg following the other. And then nothing. There was nothing to see on her face, nothing but a closed-off, sullen expression that would become familiar to him but which, for the moment, he considered unpleasant. This time, he did not hide. He stayed at his desk. She did not look at him and he decided that she was trying not to see him, that her indifference was feigned. He did as she did. But when he saw her later at the hotel, she was herself again, or rather she was that version of herself that he considered more consistent with her own nature (or with his own desire), and they ate popcorn together while watching the news on a loop, watched until the short bulletin began again, then a third time, until they knew it by heart and could recite it from memory. She did not mention the car park, and he did not ask.

  In the seminar, Albers’s digressions continued – the digressions, Paul would say much later, were the class, his eyes brimming with tears at her funeral; those words supplanted the flesh that no longer lived. Her meandering meditations on the cities of tomorrow led to a single end point: even though space can’t be extended infinitely, night can and does create many cities within one. Paul was transported. He was a disciple of Albers, and at eighteen, he saw very clearly the three or four or five decades to come: he would be at Albers’s side. He would become the architect of nights, of their light. His life’s work would amount to a footnote, an appendix to his professor’s missing thesis: he would shed light on the night. He would enshrine the night, and the night, he realised, would enshrine him in turn.

  At some point in the class, each of them seized on something destined for him or her alone, something that sparked their deepest obsessions. For Paul, it was cities in darkness – a particular strain of darkness that now only existed, in the cities, to be eradicated. He was especially drawn to Albers’s digressions on night-time, and when he had to give a presentation, having never spoken in front of an audience before, he did so on the topic of urban lighting. The rise of gas and then, later on, electric street lamps; light as a new tool in the fight against crime. However, he said, inequalities remained. The nation’s unification in light might never come about. In the nineties, blue lights had been installed in his hometown; they were meant to look futuristic, although the future they sought to usher in was already outdated – a thing of the past. Like everything else in that city, a former industrial hub that was trying and constantly failing to rebuild itself, it had proven to be a dead end. Besides, he’d always heard – and still remembered, so well and vividly that it had become the very reason for his interest in these issues – that the blue light of the city centre kept junkies from finding their veins. They would pull up their sleeves to inject themselves – and nothing: turning their arms uniformly blue was how to clean a neighbourhood up and clear it out.

  Light was a wordless language that the body understood. There are as many neurons in the human stomach as in a cat’s cortex, Paul said; evidently he wanted to convey the intelligence of feeling something in your gut – a saying that science was only just starting to verify, as if the most hackneyed clichés were in fact mechanisms for sidestepping appearances and getting to the root of reality. There were a few laughs but he felt Albers’s benevolent eyes upon him, he knew that she understood, which to him was intoxicating. Amelia Dehr, sitting at the end of the first row, did not laugh either. She peered at him as if she were assessing their chances in bare-knuckled combat.

  Amelia was more reticent, or rather, her passion manifested itself in a more nuanced, strained way. She never missed a class, never skipped a sentence, but she refused to simply go along: the passion she felt for Albers was the sort a swimmer feels for the current against which she swims. Her resistance was proof that she understood. And what she understood was that fear extends the city. Doubles it. A city is forged out of its struggle against fear but fear seeps in, and so the city becomes the site of what it is supposed to keep at bay, outside its walls. There won’t be any fear in the cities of tomorrow, Paul replied, fear is to be eradicated, just as darkness has been. There hasn’t been real darkness since the nineteenth century. Amelia said: fear adapts. She pronounced that phrase once, distinctly, but never said it again; either she was too proud to repeat herself, or she wasn’t as self-assured as she claimed to be. Often, Paul realised, Amelia’s vehemence disguised a secret wish to be proven wrong. Often, Amelia Dehr was sorry to be right.

  Soon, without any apparent discussion, they started sitting together in class, not looking at each other, slipping each other pens and sheets of paper. For lack of money, Paul couldn’t buy all the books, and so he read with her, turning the pages as one might for a musician, sensing instinctively when she had finished. There was almost nothing to see there, but what there was to see was beautiful. That was how it was, at the beginning: almost nothing. One day, as Paul’s friends, the friends he was slowly abandoning, watched on in collective disbelief, Amelia, without turning her head to Paul, without showing any sign of particular attachment, nonchalantly draped her own coat across his too-wide shoulders. She apparently knew without looking at him that he was cold – and he knotted the sleeves around his neck without a word or a look, confirming her intuition, but not showing any kind of gratitude. This icy, blind consideration being invented there and then was rather erotic. In public they never touched each other, but this curt vigilance, amongst young people who played at brushing up against one another, was so effective as to be almost obscene, almost pornographic; and all the same they themselves almost weren’t even a
ware of it. They experienced this, of course, in a wholly contrary way: paralysed by timidity. But for someone with more experience than them, say, Albers – even if Albers never let on that she had the least opinion here – it was clear that they would be perfect lovers for one another. And this more experienced someone, whether Albers or somebody else, would have also foreseen something worrying, that their pleasure would inevitably grow almost mechanical and would, at some point, for the two of them or at least one of them, turn nightmarish.

  But at the hotel things were different. The hotel was where they could be together, where they could look at each other, walk up to one another, shy and aloof, until they could sense, before even touching, the radiant heat of the other’s skin, eager to be stroked. In the beginning it was Amelia who came down. They ate side by side at the front desk. Nobody in room service had ever seen such a thing; Paul was putting his job on the line and pretending not to know it. They watched the monitor screens and the hallway screens that played the news bulletin on a loop. After a while, a few weeks, a month or two – Paul was stubborn – he finally came upstairs. This room that he had imagined and obsessed over for so long – a room where things were breaking – turned out, when she finally opened the door for him, to be a room where everything was in its proper place. The blackout curtains. The bedspread, which she claimed (lying on it, propped up on her elbows, gazing at him sleepily or suggestively) emitted chemical vapours, having been sprayed with flame retardants – in case of fire, she said – and he nodded at her though he had never heard of such practices at the hotel. Their conversations moved circuitously from the most prosaic things to the most intimate, and so what was impersonal entwined with what was profound – all questions of favourite beverages or films or songs now freighted with vital importance. All the two of them needed of this ritual, this esoteric language, was for it to bring them closer together. Maybe, as they lay on the bed, they were each already holding the other’s hand, or maybe one of them brushed a leg against the other’s by sly accident: not yet a caressing gesture but still an act of bravery. The television was off, they didn’t talk, their minds were empty of everything except the other’s warmth – nothing to remind them of time’s passage. For them, the world had momentarily stopped, or rather it was pretending to pause. A moment of grace, perhaps, or the quiet before a storm. Soon one of them, the boy or the girl, would get up on an elbow, kiss the other; kiss the other until they couldn’t feel the arm they were leaning on, and they’d keep doing so anyway, one hovering above the other still lying on their back, until a limb gave way and their bodies realigned, but in the moment, time would be frozen. It was an unexpected blessing to be there, simply there, wholly ensconced in the anticipation, like the smallest animals in their sleep. All was now motionless. For once, they were outside the evil that flows in and permeates the heart of everything.

  *

  They loved each other. Paul would have said that. He did say that; his world hadn’t been defined by fiction. In his world nobody read books, and so he had been protected from novels and what novels did to young hearts in search of reflections. He was swayed by imagination, of course, by an intuition of the unreal, but the thoughts he had in this realm were wayward, frenetic, almost instinctual; what he saw was at odds with the trappings of grand sagas and as such, at twenty, he saw himself on equal footing with Amelia Dehr. The commonalities they shared were yet to be discovered. She, of course, concealed herself behind an aura, a kind of glow, of romance. She embodied all the clichés: dead mother, absent father, money, all this money that so often turns out to be the true subject of books, its subtext – the money between the lines, the money one misses and covets, the money that puts the words on the page – the money that kept people from being so quick to insist she was insane.

  Paul, however, wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that she was insane. Their minds were too similar for that, even if their thoughts and the products of their thoughts were wholly dissimilar. He put words together painstakingly, like a young man who knows that the language he’s speaking isn’t the one he actually dreams in; she more fluidly, due to the excellent education she had received and which led her to disdain any lines that came to her effortlessly. Her sentences were swift and perfect and elegant; form and content were inseparable. Paul was left in awe. Everyone was. She herself saw that grace as the result of violence, of being tamed and trained like a circus animal, her spirit demeaned and tamped down. I’m a little monkey, she said sometimes, a clever little monkey. He laughed. She bounced on the bed, letting out small inarticulate shrieks, a language beyond words that spoke to him.

  They loved each other. All the other men disappeared, at least from the hotel. He cast off his friends with relief, the way he might have pulled off clothes that were now too small or too heavy or soaked from a long run in the torrential rain, clothes so wet they would never be dry again, their fibres utterly ruined. What Amelia hated about herself – being domesticated, being subjugated – he now saw everywhere except within her.

  The curse was lifted, the nightmare was over. So Paul believed. He wasn’t a virgin any more. Sex entered another phase, one that better suited him. It was simply that so far he hadn’t had the chance to learn what a woman liked, nor – back then this seemed like a minor consideration but it was clear now that it mattered – what he himself liked. They had sex all the time. She didn’t say have sex, she said fuck. He didn’t say anything, he would just look at her in a particular way, and she would understand immediately. They didn’t hold back, or rather the way they held back was in the moment, of the moment: there was always a screen somewhere, a screen turned on somewhere. He fell asleep while in her, or he came on her, on her stomach or her breasts, and then carried her to the bathtub, where he washed her scrupulously, and the faith he felt in his own gestures aroused him anew, and she laughed and sucked him off or he stepped into the water with her. Sex defined everything about their relationship. Even when they read side by side or face to face, it was sexual, even when he was stuck pacing warehouses or car parks or darkened stores for the night and she was having dinner with her father.

  This was an absent father, whose name rarely crossed her lips, a man who only ever existed when she, putting on makeup for the occasion, applied lipstick to the mouth that formed those words. Afterwards she and Paul came back to each other; he was exhausted and sad, and she consoled him, sucked him off again. She washed the crud of his night shift off his body and the red of her lipstick off his cock, and he wondered if it was the same lipstick she’d had on the night before, when she’d gone out, or if she’d redone her make-up some time that evening or early in the morning. How she’d redone it, in which reflective surface, in front of whom.

  Their teachers (Albers excepted) resented her for anything and everything, for being provocative or aloof, sarcastic or indifferent, or simply difficult. At the hotel, however, things were different. At the hotel (which, to Paul, meant where they could be together), Amelia was passionate and attentive and funny. She was also reclusive, but she still welcomed his company eagerly, gratefully, as only children did. Until they’d had enough and absolutely had to get away, out of sight. This did not bother Paul in the least, because nothing about Amelia bothered Paul in the least.

  She hid her books and papers under the bed, as it was the one spot the maid service always skipped; Paul knew, however, that they were perfectly aware of this habit, and expected it. She drove her professors crazy. They were exasperated by how she could look at anything and see exactly where that thing stopped being itself and shifted into another state, another realm. She upended the concepts they tried to instil just as unintentionally as someone might knock over a glass of water. Paul believed her intentions were pure. Yet, she wasn’t clumsy. She was something else; she seemed to detect limits and sense shortcomings, she craved instability, and had a vaguely destructive streak that no one but Albers managed to see properly for what it was: a fascination with catastrophe.

  Her bri
ef stint in higher education was a long run of debacles. One revolved around monuments: from under her bed, Amelia pulled out a stack of Soviet photographs in which specific individuals had been removed and more or less successfully replaced with walls or plants; she presented these before-and-afters as examples of future monuments: not edifices but erasures, disappearances that had been wilfully planned out and executed. A history that erased people. A history that itself was erased. This was the truly monumental aspect that monuments – cast-iron pedestals, statues, commemorative plaques – hid from us. This was the architecture that she insisted be noticed. Not the way power makes itself seen, but the way it makes itself unseen.

  In this presentation, titled ‘The Astronaut in the Rosebush and the University in the Forest,’ she started by projecting retouched photographs, lingering on the one that Paul liked best, from around 1960, commemorating the seven applicants who had gone through a rigorous selection process to be named the pioneers of the Soviet space programme. Seven candidates, Amelia insisted, her hair blazing in the projector’s backlight, yet only six were visible. They stood in more or less triangular tiers like school sports-team photos, and maybe this vague, headless triangle hinted at the trajectory of a pilot’s career, akin to ‘climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep.’ In this photograph of the Sochi Six, incidentally, there was indeed a staircase, a rather insignificant one – although, Amelia said, architecture should never be purely a matter of scale – and in fact, the staircase turned out to have actually been a man. Disappeared as thoroughly as comrades Trotsky or Kamenev had been; he had vanished outright. It took fifteen years to identify the missing man, Grigori Nelyubov, who had been assigned to an orbital flight but was exiled to Siberia after a drunken brawl by the space centre. To add insult to injury, he was subsequently erased, pure and simple, from the first class of cosmonauts. In this way the delicate art of dematerialisation had (in Amelia’s words) counterbalanced the monumentality asserted by Soviet architecture; in another version of this same photograph (an image that further proved her point), the unloved Nelyubov had been turned into a rosebush. We imagine, Amelia said – and this simple word, imagine, was so alien to academia that all her listeners shivered – we imagine that the second censor told to doctor this photo, the one who chose flowers over stairs, loved the unloved Nelyubov, or poetry, or both. We imagine that in disappearing the astronaut, in obeying the order to retouch the image, he added his own twist by choosing to incarnate one of the saddest, stubbornest lines of Ronsard: that in death as in life thy body may be roses.