My teenage nickname. I wondered how I appeared to him. Though we had briefly caught up when I had first travelled to England, that had been in a London bar full of bodies and smoke and I was only a few years out of my adolescence. We’d still been caught within the clear pedagogical boundaries of student and mentor. Now I was thicker around the waist, older. I had, in name at least, a vocation and a purported direction—one in which he had been instrumental. I was dreading the inevitable questions he would soon ask about my photography. Instead I pumped him for information about Cambridge. He was pleased to oblige; still, after all these years, the teacher. We walked across the railway bridge and he pointed towards the spires of the Colleges and the old town. We walked in the opposite direction, which, he explained, was where the ‘townies’ lived. Cambridge, he proceeded to tell me, was divided between academics and students, and then those who lived and worked in the town. He was obviously proud to be one of the latter.
—Are you teaching at all?
His face became stern. He shook his head.
—Can’t, he said. But I’ve got some work in a place not far from here called St Ives. They’ve got a small museum. I work as a guide there, do some of their publication stuff. It’s alright. He grinned. It still offers me an opportunity to pontificate.
His house was on a narrow street filled with identical compact two-storey cottages, each with doors that opened to the street. His was number eleven; the door was painted a glaring Mediterranean blue. Inside, the dank house smelt of cigarette, lavender and damp. Sam threw open the curtains to the living room. There was a small television and a lumpy red couch.
—How long you want to stay, mate?
—Only a few days, Sam. I’m leaving for Australia in six days. I’ll stay a couple of nights here and then I’ll be off to London.
—Suit yourself. But you’ll have to bed down with me.
—That’s fine.
—No bloody funny business.
—Can’t promise that.
He laughed and tousled my hair.
—I share with a couple. Come. I’ll show you the bedroom.
His room was upstairs and at the back of the house. There was a tiny bathroom with a bath but no shower.
—No darkroom?
—There’s no fucking room, mate. Why?
—I want to develop some photos.
He looked pleased. Still a teacher.
—Hand them over, he said. I use a mate’s place down the road.
I threw my backpack on the bed, ripped the roll of film out of the camera and gathered the rolls of film I had taken in Holland.
—Are you sure? I can take them to a lab.
—Not a problem, Zach. It’ll give me something to do. You get some rest, have a kip. I’ll wake you when I get back.
I could hear England in his accent.
It took me ages to fall asleep. The room was lined with books. On a drawer there sat a small television with a VCR underneath. After fifteen minutes of restlessness I got up, switched on the light and searched the room. On the bottom of one of the bookshelves there were rows of videos. Blade Runner, The 400 Blows, Double Indemnity. Then there were a pile lying flat with no cases. I selected one titled Harem Gang Bang, and slammed it into the VCR. A petite blonde in her forties was servicing a room of enormous beefy Turks, three of them ridiculously dressed as shieks, and three of them dressed in ill-fitting business suits that were far too small for their flopping bellies and broad shoulders. I got hard, turned down the volume and proceeded to wank. When I was finished I removed the tape, put it back on the pile, turned off the set, switched off the lights and threw myself under the covers. I fell asleep.
I dreamt that I was flying into oblivion. The world was dark, night, but there were no stars or light in the firmament. Endless flight. Then there appeared a light. I was moving towards it. As I approached it the light splintered and I was flying over a great city, a magnificent metropolis. I could not tell if it was ancient or modern. I was flying towards one of the great buildings in the city and it was both a temple and a skyscraper that seemed to dominate the horizon. It curved and slid across the centre of this world and I saw that this structure was in the form of a serpent. Its scales were bricks and its ribs were pylons of steel. I was flying towards the great serpent’s head and I could see that its eyes were composed of myriad windows. Light shone from every window and in every window I could see myself. In one room I was sitting alone and bowed. In another room I was immersed in great wealth. I was being propelled with greater and greater speed towards the serpent’s head. I began to panic. I was no longer soaring but I was being driven towards my death. I gazed into the serpent’s eyes.
I awoke with a start. The room was completely dark and there was a shadow by my bed. I must have called out because Sam laid a hand on me and whispered, It’s just me, mate.
He switched on the light. He threw a set of proofsheets across the bed.
—What the fuck are these, Isaac?
They were the cities of modern Europe. The modern streets of Europe: Alexanderplatz, Rue d’Alsace, Kalverstraat. The streets were modern and sleek but the bodies in these cityscapes seemed ancient and damaged and broken. In print after print, there appeared the same reptilian face. The dark, ghoulish boy, his face sometimes leering, sometimes grinning, always emaciated, always hungry, always reaching out grimly towards my gaze.
—What the fuck are these, Isaac? Sam’s voice was shaking. He was furious. He was perplexed.
—I don’t know, I answered.
I could hear noises and banging from downstairs.
—Zivan and Vera are home, he said.
Sam began to pick up the sheets. They’re beautiful, he said finally, they are beautiful photographs.
—They’re fucking ugly, I roared. Rip them up, rip them all up.
—Who are these people?
—I really don’t know. Believe me. These were not the shots I took. I promise you.
I rummaged through the proofsheets. I found the shot of the old man in the train carriage. But in the photograph he was not asleep. His terrified eyes were wide and bloodshot and his toothless thin mouth was stretched in a moan to the camera. I pointed at the photograph.
—Sam, I took this shot this morning. On the train. The old guy was asleep. The fucker was asleep. I had begun to cry and I was shaking in the bed. Sam looked down at me but he did not make a move towards me. I wiped at my eyes and lowered my head. Our silence was only disturbed by the sounds downstairs. Sam walked to the door.
—Mate, I don’t know what drugs you took in Amsterdam but I’m running you a bath. We’re all cooking you up a meal. You need to eat. And then he smiled.
—Your photographs are shocking, mate, they are. But they’re beautiful. They’re not filthy, Isaac. They’re far from that. Don’t you dare apologise for them, Zach.
I reached for the prints again. Sam’s parting words forced me to feel something I had not attempted in a long time. Courage. Fuck you, I muttered. I don’t care if it’s the Devil or if it’s God. Fuck you.
I looked at the prints. Sam was wrong. Or rather, he was not being critical enough. They were not all beautiful or powerful. There were many in which the lighting was bland and dull, a few that suffered from a lack of contrast, too many in which the shapes of the figures were uninteresting or in which the landscapes I had chosen were prosaic, ordinary. I searched the proofsheets and then stumbled through Sam’s drawers for a white pencil. I marked the shots I liked on the proofs and then tidied the bed, put on a dressing gown and went into the bathroom.
I washed myself thoroughly. The water was warm. I squeezed my nose and put my head under. I washed under my arms, my neck, my ears, my hair, my arse, my genitals, my feet, my hands, my legs. Fuck you, I whispered to the night air, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I took those shots, those images, they belong to me. They’re my photographs. I could sense a trembling, a disturbance in the steam and humidity of the bath. I was not afraid. I hissed. I st
arted laughing. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I was not afraid. I would not be afraid.
It was a warm night and I dressed in a t-shirt and long shorts. At the bottom of the stairs, a young blonde woman with a long face and dull grey-green cardamom eyes greeted me. She held plates and cutlery in her hand.
—Welcome, she said in a thick accent, I am Vera. Come, you must be very hungry.
Vera had laid a white cloth across the small table in the lounge room and there were cushions spread around it. She set down the plates and the cutlery, then poured me a glass of wine.
—The men are cooking, she said, and led me to the kitchen. Sam was briskly stirring a hissing wok. The other man, who seemed a giant in the cramped tiny alcove, had his back to me.
—Isaac, this is Zivan.
The man who turned and smiled was at least six and a half feet tall. But more than his height, more than the undoubted beauty of his strong broad face, what struck me was the warmth of his wide smile. I could not help beaming back at him, immediately. He grabbed my hand, shook it firmly, and welcomed me. Then, turning back to his cooking, he ordered me to sit, to drink and to smoke.
—It will not be long. But you have time for a cigarette.
I immediately wanted to photograph him. I wanted to take shot after shot of his smile. Vera offered me a cigarette.
She too was striking, but it was an austere beauty, there was no softness to her face. Her fair hair was long and fell in subtle waves across her cheeks and her shoulders. Unlike her husband, her mouth did not fall naturally into the slant of a smile. There was sadness in her weary eyes, and a wariness across her thin mouth. She sucked on her cigarette, vehemently drawing in the fire and speedily expelling the smoke. She had finished her cigarette and had lit her second while I was still nearing the end of mine. Choose some music, she insisted.
Their cds were all piled across and under and by the side of the television. I could tell immediately that none of the occupants of the house were passionate about their music. There was a spread of titles. Classical and opera, rock and roll classics, a few Slavic titles, a few ethnic titles and the soundtrack to Blade Runner. Nothing to indicate a collector, no indication of a grand passion for a genre or a style of music. I chose the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet.
She smiled at the first whiplash yelps of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. She swayed to the music, and then fell about laughing. Laughter made her pretty. Laughing, she looked girlish and young. Unsmiling, her face had no age.
—I love to dance to this, since I was a very young child. She indicated a small height with her hand. Is such a sexy song.
—It is.
She pointed to the wall opposite.
—See, Isaac, I have had you looking at me for months.
It was a junior effort, done when I was in Sam’s class. A self-portrait. I was sixteen and sitting against the school fence on St George’s Road. I look weaselly, a coarse coat of fluff across my top lip, as I squint in the sun. I had thought myself so ugly then but all I saw now was my youth, my impatience and my trepidation.
—It smells good, I said, nodding towards the kitchen and taking a seat next to her on a cushion.
—And you are still a photographer?
—Yes, I am.
—Yes?
—Yes, I am.
—I admire photography. She laid equal stress on each syllable.
—What do you admire about it?
—It is the most truthful of the arts.
I was about to launch into a well-refined counter-argument. Then I remembered the prints upstairs. I realised that I agreed with her.
—And are you a student?
She shook her head savagely and drummed her fingers hard against the table. Where are the men? She shook her head again.
—I was a student in Yugoslavia. No more. Now I clean for students. I am a cleaner, at the Cambridge University.
—What’s Cambridge like?
She snorted.
—Big. There is a lot of cleaning.
—It is a fabulous university.
Zivan had entered the room, balancing three plates in his hands. Vera threw up her hands in objection to her husband’s comment. She gave a scornful whistle.
Zivan and Sam brought in the rest of the food. There was a steaming roast of lamb with baby onions and finely sliced potato. There was a Mediterranean salad of tahini and eggplant and long green beans stewed in a tomato sauce. The room quickly filled with the fragrant smells. I attacked the food immediately, spilling oily potatoes on my plate, biting into huge chunks of the sliced garlicky meat. My appetite had returned, it was normal. I was in England, I knew the language, I knew the rules. Maybe everything had returned to normal. Sam came in from the kitchen with a bowl of bread and sat beside me. He hugged me and raised his glass.
—To our Australian friend.
Zivan towered above us. He had his plate between his legs and Vera had one arm draped across his jutting bony knee. I stole glances at him throughout the meal. He caught me at it and smiled back. His messy hair, blends of yellow and cinnamon, fell across his forehead; he kept flicking it away from his eyes. His eyes were noon blue, as wide and open as his smile. His mouth, his eyes, were too big for the lean, wide face. They made him appear boyish. Sam had told me he had recently turned thirty. If I had not known that, I would have assumed the man across from me was in his early twenties.
Vera’s face, her body, seemed all sharp planes. The clothes she was wearing, a loose linen blue tunic and a long, straight black skirt, deliberately hid her body. There was a puritan efficiency to her, evident in the way she chose to dress. And in her wary, cautious gaze. But as I watched her eat, attacking her food with the same compulsive appetite as she smoked her cigarettes, watching her attentive sharp eyes dart from her husband, to me, to Sam, to sounds outside the room, outside the house, I found that I was becoming captivated by her.
Each of us was making sounds of pleasure as we ate, as we chewed on our food and drank our wine. Happiness was coursing through me and with it an inevitable distant longing for home. Colin, food on the table, the radio or the stereo or the television in the background. Home.
As if reading my thought, Sam asked, How’s Colin doing, Isaac?
—Same. Col’s well.
—And your mum?
—She’s good. A bit old, a bit of gout. She’s alright. Immersed in the grandkids.
—And what’s happening in the old country?
Three pairs of eyes were on me.
—Not much good.
I thought back to The Guardian I was reading at the train station at Harwich that morning.
—Same as here, really. It’s all national security and fear about terrorism and refugees. The old country’s fucked.
Vera, her mouth full, exploded.
—Terrorism, bloody terrorism. I am sick of hearing about terrorism.
—Do you have many refugees in Australia? asked Zivan.
—A few. We lock ’em up.
I looked down at my plate and picked at the beans. I didn’t want to speak: talking about Australia in Europe still shamed me.
—That’s not quite true, Sam interjected, we lock up asylum seekers, not refugees.
I was surprised at his pedantic distinction.
—Technically, yes. But most asylum seekers are still refugees.
—There has to be a process of ascertaining genuine refugee claims.
I was disconcerted by his measured counter-argument. I had expected him to share my outrage.
—And that includes locking them up, in the fucking desert, even children?
He shook his head. Vera put down her fork.
—You lock up children? In the desert?
I nodded.
—Has it always been like this?
—No, answered Sam for me, let’s just call it ultimately another by-product of terrorism.
Vera groaned at this and broke off a chunk of bread.
—They justify everything,
every evil, under the myth they are protecting us from terrorism.
—Quiet, Vera.
—You be quiet, Zivan. I will say what I like. The real terrorists are the Americans.
Sam put his plate down.
—Those people who died in New York, those people who died in the World Trade Center, they were not terrorists, they were murdered by the real terrorists. His voice was steel.
Vera scowled.
—Do you wish me to lie? I will not pretend a grief I do not feel. My grief was exhausted a long time before that. No, Sam, I was happy to see New York bombed. So they can understand, finally, what it is to suffer.
—You are alone in thinking like that. Sam’s voice was shaking.
—That’s not true.
Everyone’s eyes turn to me.
—My mother felt that way. I was watching it with Colin, and you have to remember, it was late at night, and we were both transfixed to the screen. It seemed both real and surreal all at the same time. And then I called Mum because she’s all alone and I thought she might be really frightened but when I called she sounded very calm and the first thing she said, the very first thing she said was, epitelos. I repeated the word. Epitelos.
—What does that mean?
It was Zivan who answered Sam.
—Finally. It means, at last.
—See, Vera’s tone was quiet and firm, I am not alone.
Zivan piled salad onto his plate. He took a bite of cucumber, chewed it carefully, then sipped his wine.
—I cannot be happy when so many people are dead.
I turned to him.
—I don’t think my mother was talking about the deaths. She was horrified by it all, of course she was. But she’s a fucking Greek, don’t forget, she believed that the Americans had it coming to them. Christ, I’m an Aussie and I felt some of that.
I turned to Sam.
—You must have felt a bit of that yourself.
—No, I certainly did not. I have friends in New York, Isaac. I’ve been to New York. I couldn’t feel that. I love that city.
—And I loved my Sarajevo, look what happen to that.
Dead Europe Page 32