Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  She mishandled the situation. All the love she had thought she could rid herself of by leaving Paul was transferred onto him; she thought she could see within him, within his apparently healthy body (and what a body, what eyes), a kindred soul, all her own obsessions reanimated in someone else – they spoke a common language that she had learned by staying with Albers, and he by watching television, and each time they thought they understood each other, she said, in reality they didn’t. But she dreamed of an agreement, she dreamed of the understanding that she had denied Paul. Amelia was burrowing deep into the warrens of her words, and Paul at first didn’t understand that he was the Paul she was talking about here. She mishandled the situation: she tried to save him from himself, she didn’t see that she was the one who was drowning. He was getting drunk, he was getting violent towards her, she was already so lost that she believed those were the proofs of love everyone kept talking about. He yanked her shoulder out of its socket, he broke her nose. She stayed. Paul’s stomach sank; the fact was that such violence was the one thing he couldn’t have given her. He would never have raised a hand against her. The husband told her about the days, the years of fighting, and guilt gnawed at her, she wanted to shrivel up in light of his own experience. He made this woman, who had enjoyed peace in other parts of the world, pay. He made this woman, who had had the sorts of thoughts that Western children who bore no connection to the war thought, pay. She was both happy and unhappy. She got pregnant once, twice, it didn’t take either time, the life she so wanted to feel within her failed to stir; it stayed there, however, a small leaden bullet, a foreign body. Fucking hell, Paul said. I felt at home, Amelia said, it’s hard to explain. The more my body betrayed me, the more I felt at home.

  She’s gone mad, Paul thought.

  She stayed with him a long time, several years. They lived together for as long as the war had lasted. Her husband (yes, Amelia confirmed) wove her narrative around these actions that he undertook at night, in secret – the resin, the plaster removal. This man, this body that had lived through the war, became the puppet through which she could express what she otherwise, she presumed, would have had no standing to express. Reconstruction as obscenity, erasure as crime, as continuation of war by other means. Or, maybe, the melancholy rage of a mind seeking, somewhere in the world, a landscape commensurate with its own devastation. She wanted a world in ashes out of which to revive the still-flickering embers of her heart. She made an artist out of him. He became famous. He dyed the fountains of the old world and the new world alike a vivid red. He fired machine-gun bullets into the ceilings of famous buildings and called it art. She was both nothing and everything; she was the wife. That suited me, Amelia said, and Paul knew before she did that she was lying. He travelled. He crossed the world and spread his message, an appeal for memory to becomes an arena and an experience, freed from the limited spaces to which it had been confined. Even the biggest plaques, the biggest monuments, were a stream of false memories, an artificial synthesis meant to free us from what they were designed to commemorate: instruments of forgetting. He travelled in this way, lived off this polemic against cities turned into museums and wars turned into museums and reigns of peace turned into museums; if it keeps going like this, he said (and it was she speaking through his mouth), soon, in the West, there will be only survivors and tourists. People listened to him, rapt, as an exception, an anomaly. Time passed. Amelia never accompanied him. She stayed there, at home, in their home, she said, even though those words rang hollow. She didn’t find her mother, she didn’t have any children. The city was rebuilt, then expanded. One day she came back to the house and she found him sitting at the kitchen table. They looked at each other for a minute, then he aimed the barrel of a pistol at his head and blew out his brains.

  See? You had a close call! she said to Paul before letting out a low, mirthless laugh that sounded more like a cough, and quickly devolved into one. They went back to the museum. Do you remember what Albers used to say? About a fearful history of art? I was sceptical about it at the time but not so much now: Albers is always right. It just takes time. I assure you, she said, slipping her arm through Paul’s in front of a huge picture by an American painter (an abstract expressionist whose worth was divine, exorbitant, preposterous, and who had painted a piece that several of Paul’s colleagues, none of whom knew each other, insisted they had seen unceremoniously sitting in the bathtub of Amelia Dehr’s father, whose worth was equally divine, exorbitant, preposterous); an artist whose works had derived their form and their function from paint flung aimlessly across an unprimed canvas – I assure you that you can’t look at things the same way once you’ve seen a wall splattered with brain matter.

  She had odd hobbies. She walked down streets and counted steps. She walked down streets and counted park benches, or surveillance cameras, or worn mattresses on the ground, or shattered bottles, or shards of glass. They saw each other more often. They wanted to talk about art; crimes kept getting in the way. They saw images of chaos, scenes of violence in which they didn’t recognise their city or country. They could count mass killings or attempts at mass killings on the fingers of one hand, and yet came to filter all urban experience through them. The first time, he called her to see where she was. The second time she was the one to call him. The third, they were together and had to think about who to call. Can a city die of fear? Paul wondered. It reminded him of something from his younger days although he didn’t recall what. What is it that dies in a city that dies of fear? He nearly asked Amelia, but held back. One day she said to him, Imagine there’s an attack. Right here, right now. She had pointed at the nearly deserted halls of the museum. Imagine. What would you save? Paul reflected. It would have to be something precious, of course, but also light, he told himself. Or maybe something that could stop a bullet. Imagine, said Amelia, smoke, explosions, gunfire. The ground shaking. Screams. What would you save of the twentieth century?

  Paul ended up shrugging. My skin, he said. She had laughed, that hollow laugh she now had. You’re the best, she’d said, I always knew it. You’ll bury us all.

  The darker the hour, the more Amelia was herself again, was lively again. If only I’d known … I could simply have waited here for what I’d gone to find down there, she declared one night, in one of those extravagant restaurants that Paul took her to, more to prove something to himself than to her, for whom everything seemed equal, except maybe for danger.

  She tried to live. She really tried, he knew her and watched her do it. She drew up lists on pale yellow sheets, chosen for the light that seemed to radiate from them, a wintry sun that must have been missing from her days. Shopping lists. Things she desired, things to desire, just writing down their names was enough for her. One day he saw at the top of a page, in small caps, like a title, THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, and nothing below. She bought lipsticks and organised them by shade, then by texture. They made love. The first time was hesitant, awkward, sublime. They were out of sync, clumsy, moved. The second time, already they were in harmony, efficient, a mechanical ballet that nothing, not even the heart, could disrupt. Paul felt sad and used. Amelia felt used and sad.

  Get an apartment, Paul told her. You can’t live like that, in your suitcase. (He travelled so much that he mixed up languages, or rather translated everything out of the nationless English that was now a black hole sucking in everything it touched.) She half-followed his advice, no longer living in the hotel but in other people’s homes; for weeks or months she inserted herself into domestic fictions, in show apartments for a life not her own. She organised her lipsticks in the bathroom, pretended to be at ease. Paul worried a bit; he couldn’t help it. She bought a pale coat, an off-white one with big wide sleeves, a big wide collar, and a belt – a garment that let the wind in in all the worst spots; the wrists, the neck – a snowy coat that she roamed the streets in, that she brushed every night, examining it as intently as a crime scene, plucking out imperceptible specks of dust, brightly coloured fibres,
sometimes strands of hair that weren’t hers: proof that she had been in the city, in the world, that her encounter with them had indeed happened. She wore trousers that bared her ankles, billowed elegantly, always in-between lengths; her wardrobe called to mind her unfinished gestures, which invariably fell short of their goal – before hitting their target, Paul knew, who understood her, who knew that any action Amelia completed wasn’t so much an action as a blow. She tried to live but everything was complicated. Sometimes, she whispered to him, I look in the mirror and I don’t recognise myself. One day she called him to ask where she was. I don’t know, Amelia, Paul said, taken aback. He thought at first that she was lost. What do you see? The Eiffel Tower, Amelia said after a while. Take a cab, Paul said. Take an Uber. No response. Paul, Amelia finally said, if I see the Eiffel Tower, does that mean I’m standing in it? A chill came over him, and it had nothing to do with the weather. No, Amelia, if you see the Eiffel Tower that means you aren’t in it.

  She drew maps freehand, maps of abandoned cardboard boxes and the men who lay in these boxes, abandoned mattresses and the families who lived on these mattresses. Every day, every two days, the maps had to be redone. The city that had once seemed immutable became mobile, floating, even its smallest markers ended up disappearing. She gave away money. She gave away her coat, her watch, her address. Slept on Paul’s couch. Then she didn’t sleep any more. I don’t know, she said, I’m afraid. Afraid of what, Paul asked.

  She was afraid of disappearing, or of some essential part of herself disappearing (let’s say: my feeling of being myself ), or of a crime happening, with her or some essential part of herself (let’s say: my sanity) the victim and another (let’s say: this part of myself that I don’t recognise) the perpetrator. Do you need to see a doctor? Paul asked, and Amelia rolled her eyes. He went to see her after work. He would watch her as she fell asleep. She wasn’t self-sufficient any more, she needed to feel that she existed in his eyes. It might well, Paul thought, have been someone else’s eyes, but as it was, he was the one who was there, in the apartment of a stranger greedy, perverse, or poor enough to open his personal space up to other strangers – something that would never have occurred to Paul. As Amelia was neither poor nor greedy, he worried about her lifestyle choice which was, Paul thought, not at all a lifestyle choice. More than once he ended up sleeping on the bed beside her, or on the floor, or in the armchair he was sitting in. One morning, in a kitchen, where they drank a coffee in silence, caught in a beam of light – the composition of the scene recalled both a Hopper painting and various advertisements – he, poorly shaven, still improbably attractive in his clothes from the night before, she in a pale-pink kimono that almost revived the glow of her twenty-year-old self – she said, in a joyful voice that was like the abrupt return of the previous Amelia, the long-gone Amelia: wouldn’t it be funny to hide things in these apartments? Under a floorboard? In a wall? Nobody would know. And, one day, six weeks, six months later, when we’re not even in the city any more, or this country, or (she didn’t finish the thought) – boom. In the act of bringing his cup to his lips, Paul was stunned into stillness – there was a shift in the ordinariness, the banality of the moment. What had changed was the impression that this morning could have been lived and acted out by other people; the serenity of knowing that it could have been experienced by anyone else their age. And Amelia had forced them to view themselves as only themselves – not others – by invoking this catastrophe. She broke out laughing. Deprived of the comfort of not having to be himself, Paul wasn’t sure how to react. They had sex standing up in the sunlight, but decided not to talk about it, not to think about it, and soon it was as if it had never happened.

  *

  Of course, he had done some research. No sooner had she turned her back than he’d pulled up all his screens to gather the necessary information about art, war, revolvers; he put all the pieces together in a matter of seconds, down to the model of the gun he’d used to kill himself. We can call him Paul, if you want; that wasn’t his name, of course, but that didn’t slow him down, or barely did. Everyone’s identity was reduced to a net of words that wrenched an absent body, wrested it, wrung out the opposite of words: an image. The photograph of a hulking, sad man with a beard, his arms crossed, thick gold and silver bands on his ring finger and his little finger. Bands, but no wedding ring. Index, thumb, and middle fingers that he used for everything, including pulling a trigger, all sensibly unadorned. We can call him Paul, if you want – but why should he? Paul didn’t want to. He pieced together all the facts but never knew what it was like, to step into a room that he had called home, and to see a firearm, a mouth (a chin? a temple? so many particulars escaped him); he never knew what the light was like, what that strange dissociation was like – that thing that had settled between she who saw everything without feeling anything and she who felt everything without doing anything, without being able to do anything – between one and the same person. Amelia, with perhaps a shopping bag dangling from her hand, maybe heavy enough for her bluish veins to stand out on her wrists and the back of her hands, it’s possible to figure out a woman’s age that way, too, her hands clenched and relaxed. So many things one never fully knows, Paul thought; and if art means the contagion of an experience, the inoculation of an experience that wasn’t lived yet was still felt, then all that remains is to find the form through which it can all be internalised: the light, the strange sentiment of being nailed there without any sentiment, the gunshot, the smell, the smells, a whiff of bone, powder, seared brain and hot blood. Of course, if this form existed there would be no way to distinguish it from life, and in that way it would amount to torture.

  As for art, the husband’s career had been brief and not as notable as Amelia had made it sound. Less notable, but, perhaps, more interesting. One day, he had released a wolf into a downtown park in Berlin – the only European capital that supports art to this degree, or this kind of art to this degree – a wolf who had terrorised the population, a wolf seen by people and photographed in the bushes, there, a wolf that might have been two animals, or a whole pack. Wolves are intelligent, social animals; they have a code that doesn’t allow them to abandon a member, even if old, even if wounded – yet wolves carry a sad reputation. It was a wolf people protested against all day and all night, in front of the park, on the sidewalk, protected by railings. It was a hunted wolf which revived ancient, deep-rooted, seemingly long-forgotten fears; it resurrected the nearly obsolete art of battue hunting, the principle of which had remained and would remain unchanged – which itself revived a continuity, a tenuous thread through human experience: armed men padding through the grass at dawn. It was a wolf that they forced into the open and took down one day, and another – but they were just dogs, and the lupine madness reached a point of no return until it became clear that there was no wolf; there had never been one. No matter how many officials insisted otherwise, the wolf kept on being sighted, it went on haunting particular dips in the land near the lake.

  Amelia, oh, Amelia, thought Paul.

  *

  The video of a conference in a museum auditorium. The man starts talking in shaky, heavily accented English – he seems drunk, or quite simply ill-suited, yes, wholly unsuited to this context – and it’s mortifying, but also thrilling; the schadenfreude of seeing a man drowning in his incompetence, and not feeling obligated to help him out. Not feeling obligated to ask if he should be helped out, in fact, because the incompetence had begun elsewhere, before, and would continue on forever, whether or not there were any witnesses. (This was one way of looking at it.) He tries to explain about the wolf, the park, he thrashes around in his words; he digs himself in deeper, like sinking into quicksand and finally, in exhaustion, he gives up the fight. The silence builds up; just when it becomes unbearable, he smiles, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him, and he bends down for a second, the camera too slow, lagging behind his movements. There’s a box by his foot, a cardboard box that he opens before the camera l
ens finds him again. Out of it comes or has come or is still coming something or several somethings that can’t be seen, something or several somethings slipping under the tables, into the audience. The expressions captured by that tragically slow camera evince disgust, pure terror. But the camera never manages to show what has emerged from the box, a dark shadow going this way and that; it’s clearly alive. A woman climbs up on her chair, another on the table. Very slowly, stumbling backwards, the ones in the back row attempt to escape. The others don’t dare to move a thing apart from their faces, which coalesce into a collective mask that Paul didn’t believe he had ever worn himself, but which even so he immediately recognised. This was the sort of art that Amelia created by proxy. The continuation of documentary poetry by other means.