Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  She paused theatrically and without any segue turned to a photograph of the Bois de Vincennes that Paul distinctly remembered her having taken during one of their walks. Trees, grass. This is what’s left of free revolutionary discourse, she said. This is what’s left of another way of thinking. There’s nothing left: it is by design that we have been circumscribed within what is, as if only what has already come to be could ever exist in the future. It is by design that such possibilities have been erased. What we see here, this outgrowth, this rewilding, is what we need to reach for. This alone will free us. These oaks here. That cedar there. Soon the forest will descend upon us. Soon the forest will meet our minds.

  And Amelia left the room. Everyone wondered what to do now. Nothing, apparently. The lights were turned on, and the photograph of the forest that she had left up went on haunting the class, the harsh fluorescent lights leaving it just barely visible.

  At an oral exam, she decided to recite a list of car bombings, and was given a fail. It didn’t bother her; she wasn’t like Paul, she didn’t want a diploma; she didn’t seek recognition or stability. She didn’t need to convince anyone, she didn’t need to earn money, she didn’t need to secure a future. Paul, on the other hand, played by the rules and wanted to win; she didn’t hold that against him. He was too young to wonder who these defiances were supposed to impress, what language these monuments of disappearance were meant to articulate, these cars on fire, what aphorisms and poems these restrained acts that were not yet events were meant to express.

  *

  They loved each other and time went by and several things came about. Slowly, without meaning to or even realising it, Paul became a rumour. This might have made him smile, or even laugh, had he been the least bit aware of it. It began at the hotel, since the comings and goings between room 313 and his desk were widely, almost collectively known – and yet this knowledge was fragmented, short-lived, just as fleeting as the seasonal hires. Paul, being in the flush of first love, did not consider how risky this – the nightwatchman with a hotel guest – might be. Both consenting adults, yes, but so young. The way his colleagues talked to him shifted, as though a rift in space and time had opened up and he was now so invisible that he could only be found in what people said about him.

  Another thing happened over time: Paul’s relationship with Albers deepened. He thought Amelia Dehr had won over Albers while he hadn’t; in fact Albers’s heart was capacious enough for both of them. He and Amelia would go to dinner at their professor’s, and he had never imagined, never dreamed of such a connection. Still pedagogical, yes, but in a different way: Albers stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheeks (hovering, barely touching his skin); she brought out heaps of books, which she handed them with a few well-chosen, charming lines that gave them both the desire to read them all there and then as well as the impression, somehow, of having already read them; she offered them wine and laughed at Amelia’s jokes, or what she called Amelia’s jokes, and maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe later on she regretted doing so. Paul, who wasn’t afraid of authority so much as aware and respectful of it – or so he thought – was perplexed that, after what would come to be known as the car-bombing incident, Albers wasn’t angry; on the contrary, she seemed to have been fully aware, before the fact, of the twist the exam would take. She simply shook her head, smiling, ever so amused, while Amelia, in a pale tunic with blue embroidery, a tunic that made her eyes sparkle and that gave Paul, who knew each inch of her veined body, the impression that she was not only naked but more than naked, that she was vitally there, bared, gorgeously so, snickered as she recited the list she had regaled the jury with. The rue Saint-Nicaise attack on 24 December 1800 that was intended to bring down General Bonaparte; the farmer Andrew Kehoe’s dynamiting of the Bath School in 1927; the Stern Gang’s booby-trapped trucks in Haifa in January 1947 and those of the National Liberation Front in Algeria, followed by the gory attacks the reactionary OAS carried out. In the 1950s, in Vietnam, the booby-trapped vehicles of choice were motorbikes; in August 1970, a van exploded in front of the physics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, its target being the Army Mathematics Research Center. They cut me off right around then, Amelia explained. She had taken off her shoes and her foot was nestled between Paul’s legs, under his thigh, right by his crotch and arousing wholly unambiguous thoughts.

  Before leaving, they went into Albers’s room to grab their things. Paul had been wearing a duffel coat, Amelia a dark-red raincoat and, in the street, he had been too hot and she too cold. Amelia lingered in Albers’s dim room, looking at the art on the walls, at the photograph above the bed of a woman and a bird, the woman holding the bird to her lips for a kiss. It was a photograph that the artist had given Albers. It had never been reproduced anywhere so it existed solely in this room, a strange and warm and, come to think of it, perhaps even threatening image. It looks like you and me, Amelia said, not bothering to say who was the woman and who the parakeet. The smile on her face was a teasing one, but maybe there was something to her words, considering that one day Albers would gift the artwork to Paul. That night they didn’t dwell on it; instead Amelia turned to the green marble mantelpiece – a sickly, repulsive colour, Paul thought – and pointed at a slightly overexposed photograph in a frame noticeably older than the print, older even than the people in it: a young man in a badly tailored tuxedo and a young woman in Mountbatten pink. The young man was not a man but Albers, and as for the other, Amelia said almost unthinkingly, That’s my mother.

  It’s always about dead mothers, thought Paul, who had a crude, forceful notion of what fiction was, and whose mother was dead. But he didn’t take it personally, since, at some point, the statement would be true of all mothers. At some point all mothers were dead, and lived in the stories that young lovers told each other in rented rooms. But this wasn’t the beginning that Amelia Dehr, being more cunning, creative or simply more wounded than him, had chosen for her story. It’s always about misunderstandings, Amelia said later, sprawled on the bed, Paul around her – it was hard to say which of them was supporting the other. Maybe they had slipped into a pact, Paul thought, ready to welcome this prospect, a shared space of sorts, almost an extension of the bed they lived in. What a tragedy misunderstandings are, she said, while his fingers traced the hand-sewn blue embroidery on her tunic. Even he could sense its delicacy, its complexity, he tried to convert the stitched thread into hours of work, into fingers numbed by holding needles and dioptres lost by straining eye muscles – was this how people became near-sighted, he wondered, was this how they went blind, by toiling away for women like Amelia? But he lost track of those calculations. The threads’ loop-de-loops along Amelia’s collarbones and arms, radiating around her solar plexus, oddly enough avoiding the outlines of her breasts, which could be glimpsed beneath the white, almost transparent cloth, and needed no elaboration – these patterns transformed, in his mind, into strange scenes that accompanied her voice, violent yet beautiful scenes that he had no hope of escaping, not even by shutting his eyes, the blue embroidery now seeming to be inked on the underside of his eyelids.

  Mountbatten pink was an invention of Admiral Mountbatten. A grey tint, verging on mauve, that was developed during World War II for strategic purposes – the admiral was interested in camouflage, in invisibility; he thought that the British Royal Navy fleet would be able to avoid being sighted by the Germans as a result, especially at those delicate hours of dawn and dusk; but in terms of disappearing its success was only relative. The ships actually seemed to be more vulnerable. Not to mention that they were, of course, pink. My mother and Albers decided to try their hand at the matter, but they had no luck. Or maybe they did. Or maybe one of them did and the other didn’t. In any case they were friends, better than friends, Amelia said; Paul was slightly dismayed by that declaration, and right then he couldn’t make sense of his feeling of having been let down. He moved even closer to the body he loved, but later on it dawned on him how profoundly it had h
urt him. Amelia’s outlandish ideas, the disappearances and monuments yet to come, notions he considered quite original – he understood the extent to which all that had also been inherited. He understood just how alone he was in this world where his father had nothing to pass on to him, no actual or intellectual wealth, not even a vague nostalgia for better days. The legacy he did have would only become clear to him much later. Amelia told him the rest that night, above the retouched Soviet photographs, beneath the bedspread sprayed, or not, with flame retardants; between the sheets, deep within the particular world she lived in and into which Paul, without really realising it, had followed her.

  3

  Some ten years earlier, at the end of the twentieth century, her mother had tried to stave off a war, and then to stop it, and it had been the death of her. Amelia could have left it at that and nearly did. That sentence said it all, it was grammatically and factually correct, but even though the sentence said it all, it also said nothing, it wasn’t the language she spoke, the one she’d been taught, so she continued. Is it possible to be contaminated by a story, Paul wondered later. Are there tales that kill? But slowly, gnawing away, like those unusual martial-arts holds that appear to be nothing but a light touch, barely any pressure – but then, a year later, the heart suddenly stops. Could a story carry out such a perfect crime?

  This woman, her mother, was a peace activist: that was her calling, maybe her vocation, and so we can grant her the kindness of glossing over the enormity of her personal failure amongst the hundreds of thousands who died or disappeared. A city shelled for nearly four years, snipers on the roofs, blood in the streets, and, ten years later, cemeteries everywhere, in the stadiums, in the parks; cemeteries and oddly healed wounds; children who would become adults unable to sleep with windows open, or with windows shut. And the children of those children, who would inherit strange rituals despite not having lived through the war, the siege, so many perilous street crossings; who would sometimes keep their shoulders pressed close to walls, would sometimes raise their eyes, unsure what they were looking for – their eyes flicking up, checking for snipers lying in wait whose salvos they wouldn’t have actually endured. These ubiquitous realities: precision shots, mortar rounds, blackouts, tap handles turned only for no water to come – these sorts of experiences would be passed down in strange ways, from generation to generation. Some would go so far as to say that the fears in one era carry over to the next, or haunt the reptilian, most primal part of the brain, where I does not exist, or barely does, or only as a body in danger, gnawed at by hunger yet determined to survive; I believe, personally, that it’s a matter of language. A matter of stories – inoculated, as with viruses, by what people say, and also by what they don’t say. Paul, huddled against Amelia, had the distinct feeling that she was reading his thoughts, or rather that she anticipated them, and gave them a form that he could only blindly sense.

  It was the start of the European Union and in an odd way it was already the end of it, revealing to those who wanted to see it – or who had no choice but to see it – an absurdist performance of orchestrated powerlessness, arguments, and rhetorical questions – was this, properly speaking, a civil war or not; had there, properly speaking, been a genocide? Who knew what? Who did what, let what happen? The British knew but didn’t do anything. The French had acted, but hadn’t known anything. Or the other way around. A long chain of responsibilities that were interchangeable, power and powerlessness both leading back to the same thing; words that signified nothing. The mere mention of Americans sent a shiver down everyone’s spines that was either hope or dread, was a sickly gleam that flashed in everyone’s eyes. At the time everyone who had – or felt they had – some stake in this war had to read the signs, learn the secret language, master an alphabet of symptoms, delusions, pathologies.

  Amelia’s mother was what some might call an adventurer, or an explorer, or at least a traveller. She’d left her hometown at the end of the sixties as easily as discarding a dress she’d outgrown. She’d cut short her hair and her name alike before going to discover the world. In fact, all she did was cross the border into Switzerland. She was a poet, which now seems ridiculous to say, almost obscene; but she very much was. (I barely remember anything of this: I was ten years old when she went off, she left me with Albers, Albers took me to my father, everything I know I’ve had to piece together.) She was a twenty-year-old hanging around Geneva, around Locarno, effortlessly witty, draping her long arms just so along the armrests; someone saw she was bored, handed her the keys to an apartment in Paris, one of those hideouts that no longer exist, not as far as I can tell. It was a place with huge rooms and barely anything in them, and nobody cared whose name was actually on the lease; it was already lost in the haze of the past. People were invited over or simply dropped by unannounced, they scrounged up what coins they had to get extra keys cut, and then they loaned them out, lost them, or just gave them away; people stayed there for nights or weeks or years; it was an ecosystem of artists and intellectuals and revolutionaries and, like any ecosystem, it was self-regulated. At some point someone changed the locks, or the police broke down the door, looking for someone nobody knew or had ever heard of; once the place was all but empty, the whole process began anew, quietly at first, then gaining momentum. Places like it could be found in every city – those sorts of places were where Albers wrote her thesis. Those sorts of places were where they met each other. Two women looking for figures in the haze – the haze of tear gas. And so my mother, with her ridiculous belief in words, took up or made up a particular form that she called documentary poetry and was meant to be, or was, or should have been, an alternative to the journalistic language that had ground down our way of thinking and living to the point that we’d been hollowed out, in the face of reality (that’s what she wrote; personally I’m not even sure I understand what she means), to being starved outlines in a cave. That’s your so-called objectivity, she lamented. It’s in her first collection, you could read it if you wanted to, part of it was written in Mexico and something in the way it reads, the rhythm of the lines and the spaces between them, makes me think that she composed it not necessarily with Albers, but at the very least in her presence.

  In a way it’s a history book and in a way it’s a book specifically on vision. They were in Mexico in 1969. They might have met that man, the one who installed mirrors in the land, buried them halfway, or hung them in trees, and they reflected the sky, the leaves, and called it art; Albers saw in those acts of displacement a strange attempt to mend the wrongs the Americans had committed in Yucatán. A sort of white magic that was meant to restore what had been stolen: temples, innocence, sight. It was in the jungle that my mother wrote her book, which was also a manifesto, and told of the Americans who were there in 1840 in order to dismantle the old Mayan cities and send them, piece by piece, back to the East Coast – the rising centre of power, the one that would swallow everything. There was also a doctor amongst them, a man who was considered a practitioner of the surgical arts although he had no sample of his skill with him, and who decided to operate on the Indians of Merida for their inward squint, the strabismus that he interpreted as the embodiment of their inability to distinguish between meum and tuum. The book read like a report, or an essay, everything in it was true, but unlike reports or essays it wasn’t situated outside the surgical operation, on the contrary, it pulled you into it, you felt the knife in your hand and at the same time on your eye (there was no mention anywhere of anaesthesia) and gradually this became unbearable to read, physically unbearable because you could feel it from both viewpoints – that of the one operating and that of the one operated upon. It was drenched in blood, it was a nightmare, spoke to a primal fear. The theory of information, according to my mother.

  Did she really believe she could revolutionise reportage? That’s what Albers claimed, but I don’t think so, or maybe she, my mother, was out of her mind. Stark raving mad. But I don’t think she was. At least not at the beginning, an
d I hardly know anything about the end. Amongst the intelligentsia she remained something of a mystery. Even if Albers insisted that she was the point everyone strained towards but never touched. A vanishing point. I don’t know.

  When the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, she took refuge in the Sarajevo Elisse (my god, Paul thought, who for the first time felt he was only just starting to understand and now mourned his ignorance). The hotel where, in short, the conflict had broken out. The roof on which two snipers had opened fire on a row of peaceful protesters. The hotel was made the headquarters of the international press and several intellectuals who, like Nadia Dehr, felt as though that was where they were meant to be, the exact location where the ideals of the twentieth century and its Realpolitik had culminated: in carnage. Drawn-out carnage. One of those places where violence was both extreme – bodies exploding in front of a water fountain, in a market – and sustained over time. The war drove my mother mad, Amelia said, because she was convinced she needed to find the right words to describe it and at that stage, there would be no option but to cease fire. She needed to find an artistic means to stop it, so that the scales would finally fall from the eyes of onlookers the world over. And she thought that was her task. The task of poetry. To find a way to transport this reality somewhere else. Beyond its limits, into the heart of the West, into the heart of those who read it and who, after reading and experiencing it, would no longer be able to ignore it. She wrote. Sometimes she ate with the others, the journalists, the intellectuals; sometimes they found Italian pasta and cooked and that, in their eyes, at that time, amounted to a banquet. Sometimes she’d call me on the phone. I’d cry; she wouldn’t. She was just writing. She was convinced that the breakdown in the peace process was her own fault, a failure of her own poetry. Of all poetry. After three years, she finally faced up to the facts: everything she wanted to show the world, the world already knew. Had known from the start. And didn’t care about. It wasn’t the fault of words, or of those who used them; it was the fault of human nature, of those who refused to listen. I suppose it was at that moment that she lost her mind. She stopped writing, she stopped calling. I have no idea what she was doing. I suppose she was digging tunnels. Literally or figuratively. I suppose she started working in the black market, that she put all her energy into trafficking food, trafficking arms, so that the besieged city could keep on going. Nobody knows what happened to her. Nobody ever found her body. After the war, I inherited a box. A cardboard box, like for printer paper. It was full of her fragments, full of all her attempts at documentary poetry, all her failures. That’s all I have of my mother, said Amelia. All I had, to be exact.