Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  In September, 1943, a group of seventy prisoners in Drancy began building an escape tunnel. They worked in shifts, day and night, for almost two months, but were discovered by the Germans with only thirty metres to go. All those involved in the escape plan were summarily executed. I think my Jules was there. I think my Jules was there in the discovered tunnel.

  This is the mystery of amorous connection at work: lovers carry each other around like shadows; they trail their phantom desires; they sense as an intuitive shape the equation of the other; and they also absorb in their lovemaking the logic of each other’s images. This tunnel he entered. This corridor between us. It was surrender to the darkness that I had given him.

  You think I morbidly romanticise, my darling Anna-lytical? You think me necromantic? Perhaps I morbidly romanticise. But something in me, some limit, or some propensity, perhaps, will not allow any precise imagining of the camp. Or the precise physical circumstances of his death. Only this chute of darkness, and his face there, glowing.

  When the Germans fled they destroyed all the records at Drancy. So we will never know. We will never know.

  Hélène Levy was still searching for her son, Jules Levy, photographer of faces, photographer of brides, when she died, broken-hearted, in 1950. I went to her funeral. She had asked to be buried with a yellow star and her son’s portrait photograph, pinned together, intimately, over her heart. Both the star and the photo graph bore the strange sheen of worn objects touched again and again.

  I looked into the open coffin and saw Jules’ face, young and seductive, looking back. He was sixteen years old with a boy-smile and messy hair, and he peered from his rectangle, from his pillow of star, shyly eternal.

  I tore at the sleeves and the pocket of my blouse, but grief swelled and grew.

  3

  Victoria is sitting up in bed, wearing her feathers and demanding a cocktail.

  Gin fizz! she calls out. To hasten my marvellous dying! To pickle my exquisite corpse!

  Beside her, on the table where the cyclamen had been, stands the antique hourglass, emptying and filling. Victoria wakes at night, at arbitrary intervals, to reach over and turn it; and even though for her it bears no timekeeping function at all, she loves the opposed brass phoenixes, each holding their glass bubbles, and the uniform fall of grain upon grain, and the two tidy pyramids, pale triangles in the night-light, diminishing and building. Such a lovely invention.

  She insists too that it is a surreal object par excellence: what could be stranger than time configured as twin glasses, a slim communicating passage and the transit of egg-shell? She loves its slow hypnotic regularity. She loves its déjà vu and its iconic outline.

  Cécilia is puzzled by the disappearance of her pot of flowers, but too polite to ask. She now visits twice a day because her patient’s condition has deteriorated. There are good days, like today, but Victoria has made a decision — Cécilia has seen this before — that her time is nearly over. In her years of nursing, she tells Anna, this phenomenon continues to surprise her: the degree of human will entailed in death, the purposive way in which some patients greet their end, as though they are travelling towards a loving or imperative assignation. Cécilia, a woman preoccupied with murderous thoughts about her own husband, often wonders if she will end this way, with spirit and self-possession. Together Anna and Cécilia confer: Victoria is working to some schedule, announces Cécilia, some private liaison, some rendezvous.

  Yes, Anna is thinking, liaison, rendezvous. Her mothers. Her babies. Her perished and disappeared lovers.

  She has detected in herself a sort of resentment. Victoria is speeding her death, accelerating into tunnels, indifferent to the young woman, her relative, who daily tends and attends her. Arrows of story fly out and she catches them with her body. She is merely a target. She is the destination of shot energy, expended, then unimportant.

  What Anna knows now of Victoria is the variety of her calamities: her life is so racked by inordinate disfigurations of grief it might all be untrue; it might all be fabrication. There are too many gravesites, located and unlocatable, and too many fragments betokening self-magnification. These hurt Anna: both the details and her own lingering mistrust. She wants to say: I am here, I am yours, I am evidence of the return of vanished things, but the time is not right, Victoria is not right. She is in a labyrinth in which she hears only her own querulous voice. Victoria has entered a kind of loquacious disintegration. She chatters randomly, but with an almost demented assertiveness.

  When Jules and I made love in the tunnel — no, that was Louis — when Louis and I made love in the tunnel, we came out with white-coloured dust all over our skin. Like ash. Like cremation. It was at once the return and foreshadowing of death. I carried death like a disease, like irradiation, from lover to lover …

  Do you know what Nabokov said of Salvador Dali? That he was Norman Rockwell’s lost evil twin, wreaking vengeance on the world with bucket loads of shit. Or was it bucket loads of kitsch? I despised him, Salvador Dali. That flabby world he inhabited. That moral deliquescence —

  Where is Ruby?

  Where is Lily-white?

  Where is my carcanet?

  He gave me a snakeskin, once, a shed skin, which he had discovered somewhere outside our tunnel. It was covered in brown patterns of diamonds and exquisitely light, like web. He hung it around my neck as a lover’s garland. Later I pinned it to the back of my bedroom door, but Henry tore it to pieces. Because it was mine. Because it was special.

  Something terrible. A woman in my building returned; she had survived the camps. Her head was shorn, like mine, and she looked only half alive. A group of men at our local bar assumed she was a collaborator and spat at her and abused her. Afterwards they apologised, their caps in their hands, their heads bowed in shame. She left for Australia. ‘It is the furthest place I can think of,’ she said. ‘The end of the earth.’

  Romance makes women histrionic. This is its chief virtue, to theatricalise desire. The lover is disponsibilité: ready for the marvellous.

  ‘I am the man with sea urchin lashes who for the first time raises his eyes on the woman who must be everything for him, in the blue streets.’ André Breton, 1937. A beautiful line, don’t you think?

  I carried death like a disease, like irradiation, from lover to lover. I left tell-tale hand prints all over their bodies.

  The lights of Montmartre were glass beads to guide me. I wore my feathers and a lapis gown of watered silk. Breton looked down like Odilon Redon’s eye-in-a-balloon, and I realised I was afraid of him. (Float away, float away.)

  I always wanted to go to Melbourne, the Capital of Sorrow … Mel-bourne, spell-borne … I never made it, you know. I never saw what the sound was.

  I dream of Jules as a shadow, but I also dream him bright, outlined very sharply and with unusual definition. There is a technique in photography called solarisation, in which a partially developed print is exposed to light, so that black-and-white images emerge with heavy black borders, and their planes and their details seem luminous and unearthly. He was a solarised being; oddly exposed. The surfaces of his skin were bright and incendiary.

  I looked into the mirror and darkness looked back.

  The surfaces of his skin were bright and incendiary.

  In the British Museum, many years after the war, I rested my face against a mummy case, to check for a heartbeat.

  ‘I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken

  and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more is left me

  than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow

  than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk

  on the sundial of your life.’

  Robert Desnos: I’ve dreamed of you so much. I know the whole poem. Shall I complete the recitation?

  Where is Ruby?

  Where is Lily-white?

  Where is the flame tree?

  4

  The catalogue description reads thus
:

  Black Mirror (date unknown) 122 x 122 cm. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

  Black Mirror is in many ways typical of Surrealist pictorial art of the 30s and 40s, purporting to depict dream states as allegories of unconscious desire or meaning. This painting represents the treachery of art itself. In the foreground stands a woman in a long gown, with her back to the viewer, who appears to be peering into a tripartite mirror. The centre reflection, slightly to the left, is entirely black, and has one eye, a symbol of the limits of artistic vision. Further to the left the reflection is flaming in frozen fire. This repeats the burning figure motif found elsewhere in Morrell’s work, and alludes to the destructive power of the life of art. In the right-hand reflection, the figure’s head has been replaced by a jewel, possibly a garnet or a ruby, and may be taken to represent the financial and spiritual rewards of artistic achievement. Suspended figures hover over the top corners of the painting: one is a fat man with donkey ears (the art dealer), the second a devil, wielding a sword (the art critic). Between these figures is a heraldic black swan, its wings outstretched, indicating the corruption and blackening of a traditional symbol of beauty. Unusually, this painting features a border of objects: down the sides and along the bottom is a pattern of beautifully rendered miniature objects against a black background. These include aeroplanes, giraffes, hourglasses and Eiffel Towers, and are merely decorative, a random selection of images suggesting the Surrealist fascination with the principle of strange and meaningless conjunction. Finally, the legends déjà vu (seen again) and jamais vu (never seen) adorn the extreme top corners of the painting, a philosophical addition that refers to the endless contest in art between originality and derivation. The tone of Black Mirror is sombre, and it bears a clear indebtedness to the work of Salvador Dali.

  When she opens the door it is Winston, returned, carrying a bunch of lilacs.

  I heard, he said. I heard from Cécilia.

  Anna steps forward and leans her cheek against his chest, and his arms enclose her like a perfect wreath.

  5

  The sky was bone. Anna looked up and saw not a single bird. Perhaps, she thought foolishly, death has driven them away. The quiet worlds of bird flight and seasons and flecked shadows upon a face, the transient colours of water or stone or the high dome of the sky, these shift with the special-effects of grief. On Hampstead Heath it was Sunday and families were out and about, enjoying the alleviation of severity that marked the beginning of spring. Children in eskimo parkas and with rosy cheeks flung themselves onto the grass, heedless of mud, or fought with friendly aggression over the possession of a striped ball. There was an old man in a scarf, alone, sitting and reading, and a serious track-suited jogger leading a barely controllable dog. Beneath an oak, against the trunk, two lovers, both black and both somewhere in their early teens, kissed and groped with concentrated and disciplined persistence.

  Anna saw all this as if it were a film: it hung before her, remote and not quite real. She was conscious too of a slight instability to what she saw; the projection might indeed be a figment of light and shadow, held up tremblingly by an invisible mechanical contrivance, contingent, finite, illusive, false. She viewed it all, this world of light, from a dark and separate chamber.

  What haunted Anna was that she had not yet said her piece. She had not said the words she had so often rehearsed: I am here, I am yours … She had imagined a ceremonial conclusion, composed of a farewell, an expression of love, and the family revelation. She had imagined saying: Here I am: Anagnorisis. But Victoria died in her dreaming, luxuriously alone.

  When she was not in monologue Victoria had been asleep, deeply removed and inaccessible. Towards the end she slept more fitfully, and her fragments of speech shortened, but what marked them above all was self-communion. Victoria’s liaison was with her avatars, her own other selves, and she met them in an excited time-lapsing rush, the way, Anna thought, one sees film of petals quickly opening in a magical pop, or storm clouds skidding across an inconstant sky, or the polished sun rising or falling with the confident bounce of a tennis ball. Victoria was racing through her history, swift as an animation, colliding with herself. She seemed — how to put it? — she seemed almost busy. Then, on the final day, Victoria at last became quiet. She had been asleep for hours and woke only once, with a start. She said lucidly:

  I dreamt I was searching for something, in the River Seine.

  And then she slept again, and did not wake. It was in the end that simple; it was that exclusive. Her quietus was a slow sinking into the space of her dreams.

  And now, thought Anna, Victoria is ash as she wished, mingled with her swan’s feather head-dress and the bouquet of velvety flowers she and Cécilia had contributed, and the small carved wooden hourglass Winston placed upon her coffin, and the various conventional floral tributes from collectors and fans; and she has left behind her a wretched chamber, filled with elongated shadows and words unsaid. There was this intolerable grief, and there was also the task, the preposterous task — bequeathed formally by Victoria — of delivering her ashen remains to her long-lost sister, Ruby.

  Hampstead Heath flickered before Anna: it had become blustery, all of a sudden. She saw the trees and the grass and the sky and the people, and it appeared not present-tense at all, but waxen and antiquated. Like one of those mute movies punctuated by a black placard bearing the pretended remnants of speech.

  Beyond the trees faint smoke scrolled upwards from somewhere. Smoke. Just that. Just that prepossessing sign.

  Anna has not been in her town on the goldfields for many years. It has altered, grown. New highways crisscross the town where small bumpy roads had been. There are supermarkets and car-lots with bright plastic bunting. The old-timers seem to have disappeared, and the streets are full of teenagers with strappy sandals and cocky attitudes. In the distance Anna sees Beryl Ray and Moira Ahern, both pushing baby-carriages. They walk in unison, leaning forward, as though moving trolleys of ore. Anna waves, but neither Beryl nor Moira pauses or turns to acknowledge her.

  She leaves the railway station carrying her small single suitcase, passes the Railway Hotel, the Commercial Hotel and the Palace Hotel, and then she stands in the main street, beside the Australia Hotel, to get her bearings. The façades of the buildings are largely unchanged since the gold-rushes: history persists in this casual architectural eccentricity, in these tall shapes with their verandahs and iron lace and iron roofs. Across the road stands the elegant Exchange Hotel, with the enigmatic sign Rialto fixed to a high surmounting dome. Two men are rolling barrels of beer onto a ramp and guiding them carefully into cellars beneath. One of them looks up and spontaneously waves — How ya bin, luv? he shouts — and Anna nods in his direction with no idea at all who this friendly person might be. From the window behind her a fluid orange light seeps out, smelling of stale beer. She crosses the road and then double-crosses back again, realising in the blur of her own confusion what it was after all that she had forgotten, that she would meet her father at the Australia, not at the Exchange.

  Anna Griffin waits in a galvanised moment, caught by the currents of her own homecoming excitation.

  The town around her looks almost completely unreal. It is a confluence of white mythologies she nowadays despises: frontier heroism, brute wealth, value measured by the size of excavation and extraction. A small boy close by idly bangs at a rusted pipe with a piece of metal and the clanging sound — more than the buildings and the street names and the earth smell carried in the wind — reminds Anna of interminable afternoons in this place, afternoons of truly funereal boredom, vast in magnitude, full of stunning glare, bleached by an absorbing and drowsy sadness, from which she retreated to the lending library of the Mechanics’ Institute. There she fell into the welcoming shadows of the classics and was dragged by dead Englishmen into cold wordy spaces. There she discovered a catalogue of Victoria’s early exhibition (donator anonymous) in which she saw, like a revelation, the brilliant authority of images. Fam
iliar objects trans-mutated. The mystery of repetition. Her own landscape seen and rendered with fantastic scrutibility. Here was a seam, a claim, an alluvial outcrop.

  She sat alone at an oak desk in the Mechanics’ Institute library, her heart quickened in a kind of inner applause, and felt exhumed by art.

  Anna? As though he is not quite sure.

  Griffo.

  They kiss and embrace beneath the sign of the Australia Hotel.

  Hey Griffo!

  The man at the Exchange waves once again.

  Griffo answers his wave in a comfortable copy.

  Anna is once again staying in her childhood home. She has an iron bed with a horsehair mattress on the back verandah, and a clear view of the pigeon coop, ringed by diamond wire, and neat rows of glossy corn, carefully irrigated by muddy furrows; and further back, the rust-stained shed, exactly as she remembered it, where she and her father used to skin rabbits. Above her, and more evocation than real, the corrugated iron roof heats and cracks, releasing a pungent metallic scent; and the ore crusher, immemorial, sounds its thunder across the sky.

  Griffo now lives with Lola, a tiny plump Italian woman, who has transformed him to this gentle nurturer of pigeons and corn. She is a brown woman with a round face (my lucky penny, he nicknamed her), and anyone can tell that Griffo and Lola are precious to each other; there is a regard and solicitude in their mutual glances, and a jokey tenderness to their occasional and easy talk. Anna has never seen her father so calm and contented: he whistles and hums as he checks his corn, and Lola watches him, from time to time, through the plastic Venetian blinds at the kitchen window.