‘Stop,’ I said, and pulled at Beni’s arm: ‘Stop—we have to go in, Benoit—we have to see that movie—now.’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it before,’ he said, screwing up his face in a pantomime of scorn.
‘What film is it?’ I asked him.
‘You don’t know, and you want to go and see it? That’s crazy! It’s The Silence—Bergman’s Silence—it’s a very well-regarded work: in fact some critics believe it’s a masterpiece—though not me! Still, I don’t think anyone could consider themselves cinematically literate without knowing The Silence inside out.’
‘I haven’t had the benefit of your grand-bourgeois upbringing,’ I said.
‘You know how to hurt! What about all your filmic connections?’
‘Knowing film people doesn’t mean you necessarily know much about films.’
‘Well, why now, anyway? We’ve got lectures.’
I explained.
‘You’re telling me that in all seriousness you want to spend the whole afternoon in cinematic darkness because a single publicity still reminds you in some vague way of something you saw years ago?’
‘Can you think of a better reason to see a film?’
‘Not really.’
‘Let’s go in, then.’
We did: the film enveloped us. Its plot is straightforward. Two women and a young boy travel by train through a strange country whose language is unknown to them. There are tanks patrolling in the streets; the atmosphere is redolent of the Cold War years in the Eastern Bloc. The older of the two women is gravely ill: they have to break their journey; they find accommodation in a dilapidated grand hotel: the boy explores his new surrounds; the rooms, the long, empty corridors. A lone waiter befriends him; a troupe of dwarf performers amuse him, and amuse themselves by making mock of him. The older woman—a translator—makes lists of words in the mystery language; her sickness worsens; the younger woman pursues a brief, wordless liaison. The two are sisters, but not close; they bear each other grudges: they argue, they speak harshly: it is the climactic scene. A brief coda follows: the translator lies still, eyes wide, awaiting death; the younger woman and the boy travel on; their train pulls away, rain falls, the film ends. We left the cinema: I was silent, and greatly moved.
‘So,’ said Beni: ‘See any parallels?’
I looked back at him, and tried to smile.
‘That’s a wan little smile,’ he said.
‘Analogies, maybe,’ I answered: ‘Not exact parallels.’
‘You must have had quite a childhood!’
‘The mood was familiar, certainly, that’s all I mean. I’ve been in places like that. I’d like to see the film again.’
‘Don’t pay too much attention to films that seem to retell your own story,’ said Beni: ‘The whole point of cinema-going’s to experience something new.’
‘You don’t think one can learn from seeing familiar themes explored by different eyes? You don’t think art illuminates?’
‘I’m sure you think your life’s richer than a quickly thrown-together piece of arthouse angst.’
I said nothing, and we walked on, and I turned over what we had seen: the details of the story, the pacing, the words exchanged, the things unsaid. Even as the film was screening I could see the half-rhymes it made with my own experience of childhood: it stayed with me—but only long afterwards did I come to realise that encounters with The Silence were playing an unusual role in my life.
I was in Budapest, and it was night, a summer night in 1989. I was travelling with a photographer and a team of documentarists: we had been together since the start of August, and we were nearing the month’s end. It was the midpoint of that year of revolutions: the world I had known all through my youth was being remade before my eyes. The next morning, the border with the West would be opened: a first breach; a fatal breach: we could sense it—for the regimes of Eastern Europe the end was drawing near. We had an apartment in a new building by the Chain Bridge and the Danube. I looked out onto the flowing river and the moon’s gleam reflected in its current, and the dark mass of the castle high on the opposite bank. I watched the river barges steaming past at speed; I watched the tail-lights of the cars on the far embankment driving by. In the plate glass of the window I could see the flicker of the television on the wall behind me. Something made me pay attention. I turned, and looked: the scene was familiar—the boy from The Silence, running down the hotel’s empty corridor. I had found some western cable channel and left it on. I sat close before the screen, and watched, and let the story take hold of me again.
In the south of France, six months later to the day, I had the same experience. It was in Toulouse. That afternoon I walked past a bookshop close by the Place du Capitole. There was a copy of Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre in the window: it was in mint condition, its pages uncut—a collector’s item. For years I had searched for this bitter manifesto, and dreaded finding it. I bought it, at vast cost, exchanged complicit glances with the bookseller and went back to my hotel room. I began to read the book, which is unsurpassed in the violence of its language and the force of hatred it conveys. I read through it, as much as I could bear, and fell asleep. In the small hours I woke. The television was still on: The Silence, with Spanish subtitling, was being shown: I could see the actress Ingrid Thulin, as the translator, writing her notes and staring into the void.
The same, too, in Moscow, on the day of the failed coup that brought about the Soviet Union’s end: a signal again, a private sign. I was there collecting eyewitness accounts, quite unsure what the past few hours on the barricades had meant and what the day ahead would hold. Night fell. I looked in vain for enlightenment from the official television news broadcasts, and switched over: I saw the first scenes of The Silence unfolding on a foreign channel, and knew at once more risk and danger lay ahead. And I could multiply this sequence of coincidental broadcasts of the film at fateful moments, at points of change in my life’s course—but even as I set these words down I realise no one will ever have such experiences again: it is no longer possible. The days when films were rare, and exquisite, and one went to any lengths to see them, and paid heed to the times when one saw them, whether in the cinema or on the television screen, are gone: and a vital part of their magic has gone as well. They can no longer serve as harbingers, as tokens of life’s mystery—they are ubiquitous, and so the lustre of chance recedes from our world.
*
More days went by: I spent them with Mr Balzer and Josette. Serghiana came back at last one night, very late. The next morning I found her seated at her usual table on the garden terrace, talking to Professor Leo and Egon Keleti in a low voice.
‘Stalemate,’ she was saying as I came up behind her: ‘Pure intransigence. Nothing will happen now: they had bargaining power, or at least the ghost of it—the power of the unjustly condemned—they let it slip away.’
I touched her on the elbow: she gave a start.
‘My child,’ she said: ‘You appeared so silently!’
‘How soft it is—your pullover,’ I said to her.
‘It’s cashmere, from Afghanistan: a special kind of wool. It’s not from sheep. It comes from goats, mountain goats that live high in the Hindu Kush. They have thick fleeces, and a down that keeps them warm—it’s gathered from them every spring.’
‘That doesn’t sound very pleasant for the goats,’ said Egon.
‘Nonsense!’ said Serghiana: ‘The hair’s combed out when the moulting season comes. The goats don’t mind at all: they like it.’
‘In fact, they’re happy to live in servitude and give of themselves to fulfil their part in global capital’s great production plan!’
Serghiana raised her eyebrows, and turned away from him. ‘My child,’ she said, ‘we were just talking about you. The season’s almost over. It’s been a perfect summer.’
‘A profound summer, certainly,’ said Egon.
‘A perfect summer,’ repeated Serghiana: ‘Look: the sp
lendour of the sky, the leaves just turning in the trees around us, the cold stealing into the air, the first hint of storm formations headed to us from the south. Such wonders! Don’t you feel swept up by emotions, Leo, when the alpine autumn comes? Happiness of course, because it’s the most poignant of the seasons; sadness, because pure joy in life’s no longer possible, it has to be a painful joy, you realise the great lesson once again—all things of beauty have to fade and die. And there’s the special sadness of these days we’re living through as well. I think we can agree to call these tragic times, Leo—wouldn’t you say?’
He gave her a wry smile.
‘No view, Leo? Nothing? A man of your stature and your knowledge, with nothing to say?’
‘What should I say, Madame Serghiana? My field is science, not politics.’
‘I thought the two were intertwined in your academy! You don’t share my sense of disillusion—of dismay? You don’t feel you can confide in us? There aren’t any minders with us now; the child’s not going to tell stories to anyone, and Egon’s too deep in his own maze of contradictions to care. I’m asking you—in all seriousness.’
There was silence between them. Leo kept his expression fixed. She gave a little laugh, and spoke again:
‘No,’ she said: ‘Really? You’ve got no answer to give me—just your smile: your wise, well-calibrated smile? But isn’t it plain to you? Don’t you know me well enough by now? I only wanted to see where you stand—and when you say nothing to me the answer’s clear. Don’t stay silent, Leo—don’t make me see you as the scientist of the state!’
She stretched out her hands for a moment towards him.
‘How magnificent you look, Madame Serghiana, when you plead with me like this,’ he said: ‘That’s what I’ll remember of you when I travel back to Prague.’
‘And you wonder why I despair of you and your kind! Here you are, dragging out the last days of your sabbatical while your country’s being pulverised and turned to dust. How full of caution and irony you are. You won’t take a side, you won’t allow yourself to have principles: all you have left is your accommodations and your ambiguities.’
‘Madame Serghiana,’ said Leo, ‘you think you can embarrass me by speaking to me this way: but you know very well it’s not possible for someone in my position to have principles. To be candid, you know it better than I do.’
She smiled at him, in a measuring way, and tapped the armrest of the wooden bench she was sitting on. ‘Sit here,’ she said to me: ‘Don’t just watch. Sit with us. What will you remember of today, when you look back, and see us all again in your mind’s eye? Will you remember the blueness of the sky above the peaks: that blue that goes into white, and wavers when you stare at it, and blinds you? Will you still see that?’
‘I’m sure I will,’ I said.
‘Picture us all now, and the backdrop of the mountains. Carefully. Keep the image. Try to hold it in your thoughts. Childhood’s the blessed time! Truth’s very close to us early on. Everything’s clear—you can sense what you are: then all that’s overlaid, by experience, by what comes to meet us—and we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture that essence of ourselves we once knew well. What good fortune it is that we’ve been here, in the mountains, during these days when your world was turned upside down.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you remember, of course—so these days make an impression. So they sink in. Really, you should never come back here, to this valley—that’s the best way to preserve the memory—preserve it without taint or overprint.’
‘For God’s sake, Serghiana Ismailovna,’ said Egon: ‘Don’t be so extreme!’
Serghiana paid no attention to him. She placed her hand gently on my back, high up, between the shoulder blades, and left it there.
‘We have to decide what to do with you,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘School. We can’t send you back.’
‘Can’t I stay with you?’
She looked at me pityingly.
‘And what would you do? Read bad film scripts with me in my hotel room?’
‘Why not?’
‘So charming. Be careful. Charm wears off!’
‘Why do the mountains matter anyway?’ said Egon to her.
‘Because the mountains are a stage: they intensify thought. The eye looks into the distance; the mind follows. They’re a screen for the imagination: they aren’t real.’
‘Please—they’re as real as stone!’
‘My poor friend—you’ve never really understood. You think you’ve found your way into this world of ours, this little society of the lost, this Bohemia—but it’s not so. The mountains are only for true artists: for those who want to see beyond, and bring back what they’ve seen. They speak to the child, though. I could see it in him, up on Cassons Grat, when we left you behind and took the funicular that day.’
‘Is that right?’ said Egon, in a sardonic voice, and looked at me.
‘Yes—of course it is. Do you think I could be wrong about such a thing?’
She turned to me. ‘You should make sure you go to Luzern, when you’re old enough. To the museum at the Gletschergarten: they have old panoramas of the mountains, perfectly preserved. All the history’s laid out there before you. Artists and writers have been coming to the Alps for centuries: Byron, Wordsworth; even the Russians, even Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. I went there with my husband when I was travelling for the first time in the West. I’ll never forget it: I was very young—it was a golden time.’
‘Which husband?’ asked Egon.
‘The geologist-engineer, of course—the one who made me what I am—the one whose name I take.’
‘You know, Great-Aunt Serghiana,’ I said, ‘I’ll have so many places to go and see I won’t have any time to do anything else.’
‘He has a point,’ said Egon, laughing.
‘Pay no attention to him!’ said Serghiana: ‘Do you remember what we were reading, last year, when we spent our afternoons together in the gardens of the park hotel? The French novel—the Princesse?’
I nodded my head.
‘And you realise I didn’t choose it for you just because it was a fine romance—a pretty costume drama. No. It was something much more than that. It was fiction beyond fiction—the most serious kind of book. And now I can see the deeper reason why we were reading it. It’s a story about the arrival of misfortune. There’s a lesson in its pages. It tells you not to trust others, not to give way to sentiment: to close yourself off, and live hard and cold.’
‘And that’s the lesson you want to hand down to your charge?’ said Leo, speaking softly: ‘That’s what you’re going to leave him with, as you cast him aside, and go on your way?’
‘Uncle Leo seems to have concerns,’ said Serghiana in a velvet voice, and she fixed her eyes on me. ‘But he doesn’t understand: he doesn’t see how close we are.’
‘I’m sure that’s a great consolation to the boy!’ said Leo.
‘Nothing can come between us,’ said Serghiana: ‘Can it?’
‘It’s an impressive display you’re putting on, Madame Serghiana,’ said Leo, and he shook his head.
‘Can it?’ she asked me again, and took my hand in hers.
‘No,’ I said: ‘Of course not.’
‘And that book will be with you always. It’ll come back to you, and play its part in your life. Great books become true for their readers. They shape the lives of those who give themselves to them: that’s their hidden strength.’
‘Please, Serghiana Ismailovna,’ said Egon: ‘Stop confusing him!’
‘Are you confused?’ she asked me.
Egon leaned across towards her, and took her arm, as if to restrain her.
‘For my part,’ he said to me, ‘I hope you remember these days kindly, and all of us as well—and I hope you come back here often in years to come, and make it a place with depth and meaning in your heart—just as your mother did. There’s nowhere more beautifu
l. I’m thankful that I found this tranquil paradise.’
Serghiana stood up. She reached across to me, and took me by the shoulders, and held them. ‘You’ll see, both of you,’ she said, in a triumphant voice. ‘And he knows already. The look’s there in his eyes. He knows words have force. A strong thought’s spoken out loud, and it’s as good as true. He won’t come back. The forests and the peaks will haunt him, and always be inside him, they’ll remind him of the time we’ve spent in each other’s company, and the memory will stay. Happiness and sadness joined together—that’s what he inherits from us. We’ll be gone, and years will pass, and everything in the world will change—and that will stay. He may long to be back here, he may even set out on the journey, he may tell himself it’s a necessary pilgrimage, but he’ll always turn aside. This will be a place of imagination for him, and nothing beyond that—a place to keep in the past and keep unspoiled. I know it. I know it for a fact.’
She looked into my eyes, then across at Leo and Egon. But at that moment one of the hotel’s concierge staff came bustling up, and made a little obeisance to Leo, and the tension between the three of them dissolved.
‘A phone call for you at the desk, professor.’
‘Who can that be?’ said Leo, an anxious look crossing his face: ‘Nobody from the university knows that I’m still here.’ He hurried off.
Serghiana watched him go. ‘He has the look of a hunted man about him, doesn’t he?’ she said.
‘He may well be one soon, Serghiana Ismailovna,’ said Egon: ‘If anything you suspect him of is true.’
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