Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  The Bells were a family who told funny stories about each other. They transacted their shared bio graphies by polishing up gems of absurd moments, which they exchanged in their own economy as inexhaustible gifts. Stupid sayings, lunatic moments, comic and tricky situations; no detail was wasted or unremarked. They joked about ancestors in ridiculous accents and invented generations in the future who continued their vaudeville temperaments. I was charmed and abashed. I thought of my unmentionable father and brother. Then I thought of my absent mothers and sister and wondered what community might yet have been possible.

  On Sundays we sometimes — all four of us — went on family picnics together. We sat in spindly shade and ate corned beef and fruit cake and drank tea from a billy bubbling over a fire of sticks. Maude had come with her husband in the gold-rush, thirty years earlier, and was a buoyant and spirited woman, un defeated by grief. Her sons adored her. Their love was visible in the gestures with which they handed her food, or brushed a few crumbs from her lacy collar, or a fallen leaf from the light ruffled voile of her hat. More than sexual embrace, I yearned for this touch. I yearned for the gently confirming and the familial. The aura of veneration and simple tenderness. Ernest saw me watch as he took and flung the stray leaf, and then he reached over, as though telepathic, and touched the back of my hand. When I looked into his eyes, he blushed and looked away. Louis leant across his brother and kissed me on the cheek with a cheery smack, then kissed Ernest and Maude in exactly the same way, binding us all in a cohesive circuit of affection. We all laughed; it was joyful, this bracelet of hearty kisses.

  These fluttering and subtle moments, these lovely exchanges, I have preserved against the disaster of all that followed.

  When I discovered I was pregnant Louis was delighted and proposed marriage immediately. He even knelt before me and held out a ring in a velvet casket — as he had seen performed in the cinema — and offered eternal undying devotion.

  Eternal Undying Devotion, he repeated, as if making a vow.

  My hesitation both hurt and dismayed him. But I feared my family. I feared my dull vicious brother and my money-mad father. However, at four months I could no longer contain my secret. It was such an adventure, this body, filling up with life. I peered sideways into the looking-glass and rejoiced in my baby convex, just there, just emerging.

  So I summoned my courage and told Mrs Murphy everything; and Mrs Murphy, driven by some old-fashioned code of honour, locked into servant fidelity and mixed allegiances, straightaway left and told my father. This betrayal exploded something both inside and outside: our lives, all our lives, filled up with things broken.

  On the goldfields, even now, people still talk of it. People still talk of what happened to the Bell family in 1927.

  Henry Morrell and two other men knocked down the door of Louis’ cottage in the middle of the night. They were armed with antique swords and a metal pail of acid. One of the men flung the acid at Ernest’s face, and as he fell, blinded, the other man sliced at his side with a sword. Henry himself, so the trial revealed, cut down my beloved Louis in a fit of maddened fury. The amount of blood was immense, and there in the shadows was Maude, wailing in her nightgown, aghast, bespattered, tearing at her hair.

  The mutilated body of Louis Bell was dragged away, and under cover of darkness dumped in an old mine shaft. It was almost two years before it was found and recovered.

  At the trial in the city Henry Morrell was pardoned. He was pronounced temporarily insane, and acting in defence of the honour of his only sister who had been violated, possibly by force, by a working man. His accomplices, on the other hand, were convicted of the murder, and both later hanged in the Fremantle gaol.

  What words can tell this? Violence is somehow beyond my language. It becomes a story, told in pubs, printed in columns in newspapers, far from the unspeakable hurt of Maude, collapsing into the oval pool of her eldest son’s death, or the anguish of Ernest, who reaches out before him in burning black, knowing he is feeling in the air for the shape of catastrophe. Or from Louis himself, who looks with incomprehension into the eyes of the man who hacks him, who falls unmanned, in agony, in fearful distress, astonished to be witnessing his own death at twenty-three, and thinking: I wanted to be a father; I will never be a father.

  For myself: it is a simple summary because I had lost all feeling. I was sent to the city in the south for the period of my confinement, and the baby was born and immediately given up for adoption. Mrs Murphy attended me, but I could not endure her company and was cruel and spiteful. I addressed her as Judas, and watched with calculated indifference as her mottled old woman’s face dissolved in tears. In the meantime I persuaded my father that the only hope for my virtue and my long-term marriage prospects was to send me abroad, to London, so that I could achieve the requisite female accomplishments divorced from the taint of local scandal. I can hear myself now, eloquently persuading him. He agreed to a fare, and an allowance, and I left Australia just three weeks after the birth of my baby. My womb was still open, my breasts still filled with milk. In my mouth, the deathly taste of cinders.

  Louis was the most joyful man I have ever known; he carried his own body as if it had been given to him as a gift. I remember kissing the open palms of his hands. I remember saying: Works of art!

  And I have just remembered something else. There is a strange tale told of the Surrealist poet I mentioned, Robert Desnos. In the prison camp he moved up and down the lines of inmates waiting for the gas chambers, reading their palms and telling their fortunes. In each case, so the story goes, he predicted long life.

  Black Mirror Story 3

  People in France speak of the Occupation as though it existed in parenthesis, a pause in the continuum, a sequestered curved space in the proper syntax of history. But memory breaks open such hypothetical spaces. Parentheses only appear to possess containment.

  When I think now of the Occupation it is all Cubist distortion.

  Even during the drôle de guerre, the phoney war, we felt jagged anxiety in the pits of our stomachs. There were curfews and blackouts: the city became abstracted and strangely angled; and every day there was someone, who knew someone else, who knew for sure of impending disastrous invasion; or someone’s relative who had a story about dismemberment in Belgium, or a whole family casually executed, or mass starvation. Tales and rumours striated the air like strafe; one felt clammy, alert and charged with imprecise dread. Frances wrote from England to call me Home, but this was a ludicrous suggestion; I could not even contemplate it.

  At first I was preoccupied by Leonora’s condition. Late in 1939 Max Ernst was interned as an enemy alien — he too carried the wrong nation in his passport and documents — and Leonora was in Paris trying to secure his release. We went together to Government offices where she railed and wept and was driven to a distraction bureaucrats considered both typically female and typically English. She had nightmares about the French earth swallowing her lover, and woke beside me, in Jules’ place, shouting out at the night, her blue face staring, her long hair disarrayed. Her anguish was terrible. She saw scary shapes on the ceiling and hallucinated guns at her temple. Ernst was finally freed with the intervention of the art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, but Leonora was by then incarcerated in a hospital in Spain, believing her belly was a mirror that reflected the details of war-time.

  Peggy took Max Ernst with her to America; Leonora, eventually discharged, moved to live in Mexico. I saw neither of them again; we lost all contact.

  Somehow, even now, I remember the beginnings of that time as a kind of 1940s newsreel. First there is an aerial view, almost generic, I suppose, of Parisians streaming away from the threatened city: they are all heading south with piled-up bicycles and rickety pushcarts, and with mattresses and rocking chairs strapped to the tops of black shiny cars. They move with dull exhaustion at a slow-motioned pace. No one honks a horn or jumps the queue; it is a defeated procession, requiring the polite and unanimous gestures of defeat. There is a warm Jun
e sky, dappled with light puffs of cloud, and the call of birdsong, somewhere, and an illusion of rightness-with-the-world; then a swift camera sweep downwards to the square shapes of Panzer tanks lurching in equidistant formation along the boulevards; they are heavy and dark, with men in fat helmets perched like puppets on top. Swastikas flap from the Arc de Triomphe, and everywhere red and black banners drape the façades of public buildings. And there is Hitler himself, blandly murderous, his face already an icon schoolboys create with small smudges of charcoal. I never actually saw him, but in this movie-in-the-head he is ineluctably present; the famous, or infamous, bear such invasive familiarity.

  So the city of Paris on a June day became a city of the Wehrmacht, and for me it was a period of shameful inertia. I closed down my responses. I became a poupée, a doll. Everywhere German soldiers appeared suddenly, and in packs, smuggling their evil intentions like a species of tourist. They book-browsed on the left bank and followed guides through Montmartre. They purchased perfumes, and silk stockings and miniature models of the Eiffel Tower. Officers partied at the Ritz, and enlisted men toasted and clinked beer steins in the smoky depths of the speiselokals. They also took a census of French Jews and deported them to death camps. And they tortured French men and women at Rue des Saussaies, and at Rue Lauriston, and Avenue Foch. I could not bear to think of it. Our concierge dragged away. The fatal yellow stars. The knowledge of nightmarish brutalities, a few streets away. It was another kind of Surrealism, the Occupied city. Think of the sound of seven synagogues, exploding. Think of swastikas imposed everywhere in a spider-like montage. I had thought until then, naively, that anomaly was above all a principle of delight.

  It is difficult to describe the experience of inhabiting a city so morally ambiguous.

  Unable to sell paintings, I worked for a pittance in the kitchen of a small restaurant near the Palais Royal, one of many participating in the black-market economy. Guilty-looking men paid with handfuls of foreign currency; we never asked how they came to have these in their possession. They ate whatever meat or cheese was available, and left drunk, and reeling, scattering a few sous on the table behind them. We all despised them. In the streets we waited in long slow queues with our food coupons for a weighed portion of bread, or yellow beans, or a few ounces of margarine. Everyone was hungry. In the Bois de Boulogne desperate men trapped sparrows. Other people scavenged whatever they could. I remember there was no soap: I felt dirty and my clothes were worn and stained. As the Occupation continued, as atrocity was more apparent, I felt ever more dirty.

  It was also a kind of hollowness; I emptied out. This was in part a consequence of desolating loneliness. Most of my fellow artists were somewhere in England or America; Jules, of course, had not returned. The Eluards stayed on in Paris and were members of the Resistance: they alone sustained me.

  But when my body was occupied, when I knew my own concavity, the transformation was complete. I had been walking home one night, heading along blacked-out Rue St Honoré, down one of the side streets — Rue de Bourdonnais, I think — to the river at Pont Neuf, when I was accosted by three German soldiers. They began by calling out to me from the opposite side of the road; then one was suddenly on me, and had thrust me against the wall, and was tearing ineptly with fumbling fingers at the buttons of my clothes. Two others held my arms out in a crucifixion. Each of the soldiers in turn took me, standing up: I shall not go further into any details. It was Nusch Eluard, with her heart-shaped face, who enclosed me in a diamond-patterned blanket with satin-lined edges, and whispered comfort and sympathy, and unfurled a song in my ear, and lowered my head down slowly onto a white-frilled pillow, and stayed beside me, and watched over me, so that at last I slept. I slept as though, after all, I was still whole and unwounded. As though I was invincible.

  But this history has no refuge of sleep to smooth and occlude it.

  When I discovered I was pregnant I was not sure what to do. I did not want to become like Leonora Carrington, maddened by the idea of the war lodged in her belly, but I also wanted the child; I wanted to be a mother. The body too has a memory, and as my breasts filled out, as I began to feel my extra gravity and my shape-shifting power, I dreamt again of darling Louis Bell in the tunnel, with his lovely hands and the candlelight gilding his face. It was a reclamation. It was a return of something lost. I was reminded, perhaps perversely, of the trembling immensity of first love.

  The restaurant owner, a melancholy-looking Italian vexed by the dark times, agreed to let me stay at work in the kitchen, and for a while I believe I was almost happy. The pregnancy distended not just my body but time itself: I dreamt frequently of Louis and Jules, often in conflation, and could see them again beneath my eyelids, youthful, sexually present, ablaze with optimism. I also daydreamed in the future-tense: my child would grow up happily and light-filled in a Non-Occupied Zone. We would find Jules and Hélène and make a complete family.

  But at six months the future stopped; that is how I then thought of it.

  At six months I lost my baby in a night of blood; it was a still-born daughter, I called her Marie. A woman who lived upstairs helped me to gather and destroy the sheets, and I buried my Marie, my hope, late at night to avoid the German patrols, in the small iron-fenced square near St Julian de Pauvre. The moon was full, what we called a bomber’s moon, so it was a dangerous burial, fraught with rush and anxiety. I remembered Lily-white singing over the body of the mummy-baby, her voice abysmal and the same moon rocking in her one liquid eye.

  That night, on the floor above me, a whole family was taken away when the Nazis discovered a hidden wireless and a copy of Combat. I heard shouts and weeping sifting down through the ancient floorboards. The pitch of disaster. The tone of fear-of-death. A dropped object bang-banged as it bounced down the stairs outside my door.

  (Someone in our building — I never learned who — received payment of two hundred francs for the act of denunciation.)

  Outside ack-ack guns sounded and there were sirens and searchlights.

  I was pouring out blood, and unable to cry.

  It was only a month or so later when I saw a woman in an olive and peacock-feather hat throw what I thought was a baby into the Seine, and something hard within me fractured and crazed. I entered mourning by a banal process of isolation and starvation and know now that all my losses gathered together at that point. I began crying and crying and could not stop. I had not understood my own capacity for bereavement, nor uttered my long-contained distress. Waste. Dust. Rain darkening stone walls. The sheer weight of dragged memories and grief-stricken searching. I felt ransacked, inhuman. When at last I returned to life I did not recognise myself at all; I stared into the mirror and saw darkness staring back.

  For many weeks no one had called me by my name. Perhaps, in any case, I would not have answered. Perhaps this too was alienated from me, since I was vacant, and lost, and without child or country.

  When the Liberation came one of the women who worked with me in the Italian restaurant denounced me as a collaborator. I had confided sometime earlier that my pregnancy was ‘German’. I was dragged by furious men into the street to endure public shame. My hair was shorn — rather crudely, there were nicks and bloody cuts — and I was beaten with malice about the arms and the face. Thus on Rue St Honoré, I found myself standing in a group of bruised and shorn women, femme tondues. We were huddled together in a kind of magnetic field, reduced to undifferentiated and anonymous symbols, the bald propitiation of national shame. An engrossed crowd circled around us, spitting and hurling abuse. The woman beside me repetitively clasped and unclasped her hands; another bit her fingernails until they bled. In this group I met again the woman Marie-Claude, the woman who had worn the olive and peacock-feather hat. At first I did not know her — since her appearance was so altered — but she embraced me and kissed me like a long-lost sister, and she wept and declared that she was only trying to earn a living. That she was a good woman. A milliner. All the way from Brittany. And that it
was a baby, she confessed, she had thrown that day into the Seine. A German baby, she said. A German baby. You understand.

  When the Nazis first entered Paris, some of the residents closed their shutters or wore black arm-bands to signify mourning. I should have known what this meant. I should have understood. Disaster begins with a few oblique and isolate signs, which gather and elucidate.

  THE HEART

  The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph.

  (André Breton, Nadja)

  Blood leaves are falling.

  Hard pulses in the plum-dark heart.

  From this dormant harp, silently, Grief plucks its song.

  (Jean Kent, Practising Breathing)

  1

  In the London Underground Anna sees it: trains resembling strips of film. They slide past her in a string of fluorescent squares, speeding vision in lit sequences to a kind of profane illumination. Trains hurtle at the darkness and disappear with a roar. They bear, she reflects, a truly lovely transience. And when sparks arise in a spray at a curve on the line, Anna experiences a flash of genuine excitement. She knows she is now seeing as Victoria Morrell sees — this fleeting dazzlement, this random white flicker of ordinary time.

  Anna ascends from the Underground, striding two steps at once. Filtered light from a sky that threatens rain touches her head, and slides down the length of her body as she emerges into the street. Her heart is pounding. She looks up at the sky in time to catch the crossed arc of two swallows, diving swiftly, neatly, in opposite directions.

  Auspice, she thinks. Divination through bird flight.