Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  She had come here to the outskirts of an archaeological mission. Her job was to photograph sites that had hardly been documented, if at all, and were threatened by a potential, or imminent, outbreak of war. As difficult and seemingly inhospitable as it might be to any form of civilisation, the region had been consistently populated. Ignoring the traces of a continued human presence amounted, for those who had ventured here, to not wanting to see the peoples here. In talking about her work, Amelia said that she was working against two forms of destruction: temporal, and human. What her peaceable use of the drone didn’t convey were the forms of destruction she was helping to accelerate, by propagating across lands and minds the idea of neutral, benign technology, the idea that her machine could serve what might commonly and naively be called the greater good. One thing was certain: her work helped to advance knowledge, which is to say – as the new generation would put it – an archive with so much uncertain potential – as shapeless, and with prospects as threatening or threatened as the areas where her work took her. Work that, furthermore, she would soon no longer have. Thanks to advancements in satellite photography and in automation, Amelia’s purpose would soon be obsolete. Her popularised, devalued expertise would soon be in reach of all. Of all or of a machine, and she would be able to stay in her small apartment or in her hotel rooms, watching film after film, as she once did when she was very young, as she now did in the stretches between projects, unsure what these inane fictions would or wouldn’t bring her, the curtains always drawn, always, because she was convinced she was being watched, without even any idea of who or what might be doing so. Danger won’t come from where you think it will, Amelia thought. At the same time, danger will come from exactly, exactly where you expect.

  The ruins, often, were invisible from the height of an average man, or woman, such as Amelia. To the naked eye, it was a mountainous desert, sand and rock, sand and dust, crags as far as the eye could see. How strange, the way a disappeared city also resembled a city about to emerge – nothing, a drawing in the dust, lines in the sand traced by the tip of a toe. A game. A wish. Still, archaeologists knew better, as did Amelia when she was piloting her machine, and it was only from above, from the sky, that the outlines of former cities took shape in pale lines rising out of the depths. They spoke of another time, of another relationship to peace and to water, both of which seemed to have always been lacking – but that, too, was incorrect, was an illusion. Amelia lived at some remove from the teams she worked with. She didn’t build relationships, anything significant, except with the guides she depended upon, who were her interpreters and her drivers, her employees and her masters, because her dynamic with these men was one of almost total dependence; if she couldn’t trust them blindly, she might as well have been walking blindfolded towards the horizon. Amelia and the guides, always men, lived together in peaceful efficiency, focused on piecing together this strange land registry that would allow them to keep track of the erasure. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they ended up laughing together, but then one or the other of them withdrew into an isolation that, owing to a lack of space, entailed reading a book or tinkering with the car.

  Ever since abandoning her family, Amelia had felt light and somewhat absent, and everything had become easier, because she wasn’t fighting, she had surrendered, she was living in a singular universe which she wasn’t sharing with anyone else, she no longer resisted the strange visions that came over her in these practically lunar landscapes. She knew she was lost. She knew she’d lost everything, that the world she was moving within was entirely a result of what she hadn’t wanted to see, hadn’t wanted to know. She was living in the rubble of her rejected legacy, of documentary poetry, of the pathetic fragments trembling in the darkness of a decades-old box, of abjectly powerless words and lines, as only words and lines that have never existed to be read, never existed for the eyes, hearts or minds of anyone else could be; and yet they were all-powerful, secret prime directives; they bore dark, hidden truths, and, because she refused to engage with them, Amelia had had to submit to them. Because she knew nothing of Nadia Dehr, she had become Nadia Dehr, and this was the irony of her flight. And when, in a few months or a few years, she threw herself out of a window, to meet the concrete down below, she would finally know, without any question, what had become of this mother who had loved her poorly, badly, or not at all.

  For the time being she lived suspended between sky and land, she lived through moments that seemed straight out of a dream or a nightmare, moments when the distant past ran headlong into what still seemed to her to be the future but in fact was the present, as if time were collapsing upon itself – like today, when she saw her machine, the camera drone she had been flying, appear to hesitate for a minute in the air, saw it quiver – but of course it was Amelia’s own trembling, so subtle it only manifested itself this way – and in the empty, darkening sky, a raptor descended upon the machine, its wings bewilderingly wide, its talons and beak primed for predatory capture – the pinnacle of evolution, in other words, of violence. She tried to summon back the machine but to no avail; it was as if she could feel it being borne away by something alive, something irresistible, an intelligence beyond language, single-mindedly focused on abducting its prey, and soon the bird was gone with, Amelia thought, her livelihood.

  She described the scene to her guide, certain nobody would believe her, she mimed the aerial encounter with gestures similar to those he’d used to warn her against mines and explosives – they had several signs to communicate the totality of the world they shared, and strangely enough they understood one another well. English for what was said; hands for feelings, emotions, all that was unsaid. For danger, for the fears that choked their throats. He’s going to think I’m insane, Amelia worried, but instead the guide, who was also the interpreter, the driver, the confidant, crossed his arms and sighed. He believed her easily enough – he explained that the region was known for its bird-catchers; not far from here were men and women and children who all spoke the raptors’ language, thought the raptors’ thoughts, lived with them as if they all belonged to the same species. What men? Amelia countered. What women? What children? She hadn’t seen anybody. Not a soul in the inhospitable surroundings. But they, the guide replied, had seen her, they couldn’t have missed her, the poor thing with red hair who thought she could have with her machine the relationship they’d always had with these living creatures – creatures that they saw being born and being fed, that they held tight in their sleep and innately understood in their sighs, and vice versa. But it was Amelia who sighed. Their birds are horribly rude, she said, who gave them an idea like that, to take my drone away from me? The machine’s nothing but skin and bones! The guide took the crooked smile on her face for a curse being cast upon the men and women and children; but he was wrong. Actually, their birds are quite well-raised, he said (his hands added, she was still lost in translation sometimes), it’s no accident, they took it hostage. The explanation caught Amelia so off guard that she let her arms fall. Any time you think you’ve understood something in the world we live in, you can rest assured that you actually don’t know the half of it.

  She finally asked: So what can we do? and what came next was even more surreal, it had been so long, years and years, but still she felt the urge every so often to talk to Paul, to tell him about these moments, and the guide shrugged his wide shoulders, unfolded his strong arms, traced something in the air – a cube? a box? No, a sheet of paper. We can draw a wanted notice. As if she had lost her dog. The ludicrousness of the whole situation was growing more and more apparent to Amelia. A wanted sign and a reward, which for her, in euros or dollars or convertible marks, would be nothing, or very little, and which for these invisible men and women and children who, no sooner than one war had ended, were already bracing themselves for the next, would constitute a real contribution to their individual or collective effort to survive.

  For just a second she saw herself, there, in a beige
anorak, a pink headscarf over her hair just starting to turn white; a pile of sheets in her hand, wanted signs for a machine with six propellers instead of a human or even an animal. For just a second the scene seemed patently absurd. As if she was looking at herself, or even one of her descendants, in the future. But this was the present. The guide, with his usual know-how, had written the text for these bulletins (but what walls were there to stick them to?) or these handouts (but what people were there to give them to in this vast, deserted expanse?). And the whole thing struck her as an outdated, slightly strange, almost touching vision of the future.

  Nothing turned up in the days that followed, despite the reward promised in an alphabet she couldn’t read, a substantial amount for this population that at times barely had anything to eat. Amelia didn’t do anything. She waited. Little by little she sensed or thought she sensed the presence of hundreds of eyes in the mountain. Waiting had its merits. For her generation, waiting was a lost art. Finally, one night, a man presented himself, bearing a fragment of a flying machine, and Amelia’s heart, which had been so cold, suddenly leapt – was it sensible to be so attached to a thing? – before she realised, a little surprised, that it wasn’t hers.

  In the following days other people came from all directions, and what they brought was often unidentifiable or unrecognisable; sometimes she could make out a few letters, or the insignia of the Luftwaffe, or some other distinguishing mark, fragments ranging from four inches to two feet long, all of which Amelia, in her incredulity, bought, letting the guide haggle on her behalf, because it was common courtesy to act as if these sums carried any real value, to make sure not to crush them with the realisation that the money over which they bickered was nothing to her. She bought all of them, so she could sort them by date or size or political bloc or presumed continent. Shards of flying machines, which she organised and reorganised in carefully arranged circles, and all around was the desert – but now she felt like she was at the centre of the world, and her apparent desertion was merely that: an appearance.

  Idleness didn’t suit Amelia. It set a fire in her head, a fire that spread to her joints, her ankles and her thin wrists, her reddened fingers. A slow-burning fire that dredged up the past. And all her mistakes. When she didn’t have work to do, Amelia burned with all she hadn’t said, all she hadn’t done – a dangerous state for a woman who had turned her back on the world. But it came back, it crept in, through so many fragments she hadn’t read, kisses she hadn’t given. It nagged at Amelia: Did it blaze around her because it blazed within her, or the other way around? It was hard for her to believe but she knew it: some people lived in this world without having to fixate on so many questions. Waiting for someone to bring her the machine she depended on, all she had gathered was a pile of metal and circuits; broken devices, some of which were older than her, coming from lands or entire blocs that no longer existed – a political history of the region through its forgotten wars, through obsolescence and waste. Some of the fragments had been worn down by sand, polished, while others were still sharp-edged. Amelia waited. Her guide waited.

  One day, in a somewhat hazy cloud of sand and dust – the empty space of desert air – a jeep came to the base. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, she thought as she rubbed her sore fingers. Because of the opaque cloud, nobody could make out the car, much less who was climbing out of it. Not yet. Whoever it was started walking up the escarpment towards the camp. Amelia squinted. Well, well, she thought, and then her heart skipped a wild beat, because in the blink of an eye she was convinced she could see, further down, Paul. Paul as he had been at eighteen or twenty, thinner than that, weaker. Is that my fault as well, Amelia wondered. Her first thought wasn’t a thought but a feeling, a surge of love that she tamped down, as she had for such a long time – reflexively, instinctively – until it was back where it belonged, which is to say, the smallest, least detectable spot possible; but it wouldn’t disappear; it was like a clot she was terrified would some day be the death of her. Her second thought was that he was dead, and he had come back, the eighteen- or twenty-year-old man, to take her to task. Only then did she see that beneath the oversized anorak, below the short black curls, under the greyish burnous, was a young girl walking towards her. So it wasn’t Paul, after all; Amelia was at once relieved and disappointed. She bore something of him, though. And Amelia immediately understood.

  5

  They didn’t look like each other, and yet they looked like each other. Or rather, they didn’t look like each other, and yet they looked at each other with recognition. This mother who wasn’t a mother and this daughter who had no choice but to be a daughter talked and talked. Amelia didn’t know how to speak to a child, and so she she talked to Louise the way she might talk to herself.

  I didn’t think you’d find me. I didn’t even think you’d look for me. I thought you were smarter than that, I was afraid you’d be a redhead, but this is worse – you’re as stupid as I am. I’d have liked for you to have your father’s intelligence. Paul always knew how to protect himself from everything. Or was it Albers? Was she the one who filled your head with things? I know she died, Amelia said, she was killed, right? At her place? And Louise shuddered because she still remembered everything: the silenced, pneumatic blasts, the noise of the body she loved falling to the floor, and the blood, so much blood – her right hand had staunched the hole in her head, her left hand the one in her stomach, she hadn’t dared to move until the body was cold – only then had she called her father, not before. But she did not say anything to this woman about that. It had to stay between her and Albers. And Paul, somewhat, too.

  Was she cremated? I think that’s what she wanted. But it’s all so distant, Amelia said, and Louise said nothing, it was all close, too close in fact. None of this sat well with her. Well, Amelia Dehr continued, I was hoping you’d turn out differently. I did think about you every so often, especially for the first few years, I’d shut my eyes and believe I could see you, your first secrets, your first friends, your first boys. Yes, I believed I could see you from afar. It happened once or twice. I felt like I was back in that horrible apartment that he never let me leave, that I wondered if he’d really let me leave – and Louise thought about her childhood fears – and once or twice I woke up and I wasn’t sure where I was any more, I’d dreamed that I’d been watching you sleeping and, I hope you can forgive me for saying this, it was the worst nightmare I’d ever had. It’s true – it was by far the worst nightmare I’ve ever had in my life. I dreamed about him another time, I dreamed about him and me, and it was such a relief that we weren’t at home, or rather, actually, we were at home, the very first home we’d had, my room when I lived at the hotel. He must have told you about that. That was the best. Everything after that was, to be absolutely honest, a terrible mistake, but what’s done is done.

  And Louise said nothing. She thought about Paul, who she sometimes thought she could hear groaning in his sleep – she would slip barefoot into his bedroom and try to figure out what he was saying, or try to wake him up, but in vain; in his bare room, in his ironed sheets, amongst the dark suits draped on the valet stand or a chair, her father was talking into the void, talking to the void; and all this seemed to her like the scene of an unseen crime.

  I found your photo and some letters, Louise whispered. You kept writing to him anyway.

  The letters. Those missives she had insisted on writing by hand, as in the last century. I did know I wasn’t supposed to leave any traces. But I wasn’t doing well. Later on, I stopped. Not writing them; I stopped sending them. There was no point, after all. I knew Paul inside and out, I shut my eyes and I saw him all decked out in his elegance, his principles, his ambition. I knew him inside and out, I was the voice that talked in his mind and told him things he didn’t want to hear. I’d bet he’s more like my own father these days. She sighed with a contempt that struck Louise as violently as a slap; her shock was evident, all the more so considering that Louise was equally as full of fury
and spite. She wanted to tell her what her absence had been like; but Amelia wasn’t listening, didn’t want to listen, cut her off. There’s nothing for you to do here, absolutely nothing at all, it’s dangerous and ridiculous. Don’t you have any friends? Don’t you have any lovers? You must have dozens. Listen to me. You’re beautiful. Of course you look like him. I’m sorry, that’s why it’s so hard for me to look at you.

  But what did he do that was so terrible? Louise whispered. Her pride was all that kept her from crying like the child she no longer was. What did we do that was so terrible? Amelia shrugged. And this shrug was Louise’s first encounter with a cruelty she’d never known existed, a cruelty her father had striven to shield her against. Just to say something, just to keep face, she asked: Well, then, what did you do all this time? Amelia looked at her and on her face her daughter saw that she was annoying her. Like a nightmare, Louise thought. I was told you liked art, she mumbled.

  I liked Paul. And yes, I liked art. That was a long time ago. I left because I couldn’t be a mother, I gave you to Paul in a way, in exchange for leaving. So, in a way, if it wasn’t for you, I couldn’t have left. I loved him but what good was that? We wore each other out, we wore each other down. Yes, I left. I lived here and there, Amelia said to this child she had refused to mother, and I ended up accepting my father’s money. Like everyone else. Not much, but enough to taint me forever. You know where it came from, don’t you? No? See, I made the right choice, Paul protected you after all. You got out safe, you don’t know what my family is like. They’re all leeches. But never mind that. The money came from sand. Sand for concrete. My father may not be one to brag, of course, but he’s a robber, nothing short of a thief. He’s still doing it, that’s all he knows how to do. Tons and tons of sand. Three hundred for a house, thirty thousand for a highway. And now we’re starting to run out of sand. It doesn’t look like it, I know. Especially not here, it doesn’t look like it. But the quarries have been drilled and excavated down to the bedrock, and one of the solutions my father and the others found was the ocean’s depths. Massive boats, powerful pumps, thousands and thousands of litres sucked up blindly. All the plants and animals and coral were just collateral damage. The other solution, of course, is theft. Massive trucks at dawn loading up on the beaches all around the world – Asia, India, Africa, America, Europe. And the result is that the coasts all around the world have been weakened. They’re receding; the coasts and estuaries are this close to collapsing. They’re breaking apart. Some Malaysian islands have almost completely disappeared. That’s what my family does. And now it’s your family – that’ll teach you. But art … The way I see it, the future of art is the future of these coasts. What does it matter whether I like it or not? It’ll disappear. Everything will disappear. All that’s left will be the crimes. My father is like yours: a man constantly reinventing himself. The last few years, he’s been building artificial islands in artificial shapes, and from overhead the outlines they form in the dead oceans, the dying oceans, are palm trees or stars or viruses, basic shapes for vulgar tastes. They’re a mockery of what nature itself could offer; and even so, they’re feats of engineering. Masterpieces. And the sea levels are rising. All this time the water’s been rising and I think that soon enough all that’ll be left on earth will be those islands, those horrid, horrible shapes, like a greedy kid’s toys. I’m better off here, in the war, which at least is honest. I’m better off taking my photos. I put as little of myself as possible in them, but I still have the pathetic belief that it’s better for there to be something than nothing. So that’s what I do. I take aerial shots of what’s disappeared or what’s about to. In the unlikely case that worlds have to be reconstructed.