by Heather Rose
Would it be crowded at this time of the year? And was she fit enough? Maybe she should wait until September, when the weather cooled. She’d have to go halfway around the world. She’d need a travel agent and a passport. And was a walk in Spain what she really wanted to do? Yes, she decided. I think it is. It would be a year since Karl had died. A sort of anniversary then.
With such concerns occupying her mind, she wished Karl a good night and blew out the candle in its glass jar next to his photograph.
MARINA BEGAN AT SHANHAIGUAN, IN the east, where the Chinese said the dragon’s head rested in the Yellow Sea. It had been a marriage walk, but now, after thirteen years, it had come undone, this thing that had bound them so intensely.
It had been eight years in the planning. Letters and permits, visas and money, diplomacy, the Netherlands and China, international cultural exchange, itineraries, reissued itineraries, squabbles, bureaucrats, flights and trucks, government hotels and no camping.
They had wanted silence and solitude. Nights under the stars like they’d had in the desert in Australia, a minimal crew that would not interfere with their private, meditative walk. But there was so little time to be truly alone. Only when she walked, when the camera crew was ahead or behind, in the tracts of film they managed to capture when each day they finally arrived at the wall, driven in vans from some obscure location where it had been essential to stay. Then she had time to connect with herself, with this ancient place, with this land. And in those moments the sky and the path and the sense of scale humbled her and sometimes released her.
Ulay began at the tip of the dragon’s tail, at Jiayuguan, in the barren Gobi desert. She had no way of knowing if he too was experiencing the chaos of Chinese bureaucracy that corroded the days. She had no contact with Ulay or his crew.
Once she had thought of Ulay as her perfect hermaphroditic union. Her creative and spiritual union. Walking towards each other, they had originally planned to be drawn closer by the magnetic power of each other. Now they walked against the current that had pushed them apart.
Still, they both felt that it was the fitting thing to do. To walk this route of mythology, of dragons and gods and wild men. The Chinese said the dragon connected earth and sky. And the wall was constructed in mirror image to the Milky Way. So they were walking the stars too.
Coming from the east, Marina had to walk the sections of the wall most popular with the tourists. They had little interest in her, being more concerned with snapping each other against the giant stone backdrop. She carved her way through clicking cameras. She climbed the winding wall, the relentless steps, the ancient escarpments. She passed through the towers with their brass bowls for purification. She walked the chakra points of the earthbound and celestial dragon, and the way of human life gone long into the past.
Every day the Chinese bureaucrats and officials who accompanied her, or who joined them in each new province, insisted that paperwork be signed off in triplicate, and that each day begin with meetings and end with meetings. This exhausted her and she retreated to whatever bare concrete cell she has been assigned in yet another bare communist hotel and allowed the discussions and arguments to go on without her.
By day she measured the landscape with her body. Feeling the scale, the beauty, the poverty beyond the wall work upon her, soaking into her eyes. Step by step. Her legs each morning were stiff with yesterday’s work. Marina started as early as possible, wanting to catch the sunrise, to have those moments of pure surrender, prayer and reflection, that she yearned for.
Soon the crowds diminished, the tourists evaporated, and she was a lone figure on the wall. She wore red. Ulay was in blue. Red dragon, blue dragon. They had dressed for the film, but also for their characters, for their own personal mythology, for the mythology of duality that they had played out all these years. As the days passed she felt like she lost track of who he was, what went wrong and even why they were walking. Some days she was more tired than she could remember ever being.
She wanted to see him walking towards her. She wanted him to hold her. She wanted duality but there was only singularity. Each step she took moved her closer to him, and to the end of together, the end of partnership, the end of connection, to the end of love.
She thought sometimes only step, step, step. Every step harder than the last. She tried to climb quickly but on the rough parts of the path, where the wall had crumbled, she groped for handholds, slid and slipped.
Marina and Ulay, red dragon, blue dragon, walked on. Now they were twelve hundred miles apart.
Marina was in the middle of nowhere familiar. She felt the fear of that, and the happiness. This was what she loved. To be in the unknown. To be on the other side of fear where everything became possible. She was emptying herself. The irritation of bureaucracy, the hours of boredom as she endured long car rides and nights on hard beds after bad food—it all released her. Her body went on without her feeling attached to it. She might have been the wind or one of its riders, she did not know. Or perhaps the wind rode her.
Why had she loved Ulay? Why had there been such a force between them? How was it that they had the same birthday? That when they met they were both wearing chopsticks in their hair? That he felt half female while she felt half male. How was it that he felt like the person she had known through lifetimes? As if she had loved him and hurt him time after time, and that she could love him hard enough to destroy him. What was that? What was her rage and her pain, her grief and hollowness? Because for all they’d been, for all they’d travelled, were travelling these thousands of miles, she had no idea what she was going to do with her life beyond this.
Weeks passed. Months passed. One thousand miles. Five hundred miles. The ugliness of the bad hotels brought paradox and Tito, the excess and scarcity of communism. It brought back the controls and limits and corruption of a world she could not wait to be free of. But still she walked. And tried to shed the numbness every day with the sheer beauty of the landscape and the immensity of the human spirit that had built this wall and fought for centuries to protect an empire.
She might have been another sort of woman. She might have had a child, been a mother, a wife. But she couldn’t feel that this time. She didn’t want it. They’d chosen not to. She’d chosen not to. She wanted this life, this one life for herself. And if that was selfish, if that was the harder road, then so be it. She would do it alone. She would find the next step and the next step and the next step. She had no future she could see. She would carve it out for herself as they’d carved out the steps for this wall. On one side was the past, the other the future. One side heaven, the other hell, one side black, the other white, one side night, the other day. Life was duality. She thought she’d found her other half, but it turned out that he was one of her many halves. She could see things in him that she didn’t find kind or good. They irritated her. Stung her. She could see the greater person he might be, but he didn’t want that. Only she wanted that.
‘You can’t love me for something I might become, Marina,’ he had said.
That was something she’d discovered. You could love a person so hard they became unknown to you.
Two hundred miles. One hundred miles. Fifty miles. Twenty miles. Ten miles. Until there was only one more mile.
His team came ahead and told Marina that Ulay had found the best place to meet, a little further on, so he’d wait for her there. As always, she had to take more steps, go the extra mile, to meet him. Up and up and up she went, step after step. And she thought how much she hated him for making her walk this much further. Could he not have trusted that there was a perfectly photogenic spot wherever they naturally met?
Here she was, walking towards him like a bride, but she was no bride and he no groom. She breathed and let it go. Let it go, Marina. There is a river below and the land and the sky is reminding you that everything is changing every moment of every day and you and your feelings are nothing in this.
And there he was, in his blue coat, his blue p
ants. A blue dragon to her red one. He on one tower, she on the other. She felt her body quiver with the last thread of energy it cost her to take these final steps. Down, down she went, to the bridge. Down, down he went, to the bridge. Moving towards each other. Red dragon, blue dragon.
The sun was sinking. The land was golden, the sky was amethyst, the river mercury. The past was behind them. She sobbed then. Something dry and raw that welled up. He was there, ahead of her, his face, his beloved face, and he was smiling, and she wanted to hold him, to be held. Instead, she reached out her hand and they touched fingers for a moment. Skin to skin one last time, in that way. And then he gave her the briefest, most perfunctory hug.
It was, she thought, inexpressibly sad. This was goodbye. She saw—in his eyes, in his laughing, in his joking with the crew—that this was a performance for him. He was long gone. But it had been her heart.
LEVIN ABSORBED THE QUIET HUM of the atrium about him. There was a brooding light about Marina as the days went by, as if she was incubating another creature inside her.
‘Do you think she’ll make it?’ a woman asked.
‘I am certain,’ her male companion replied with a French accent. ‘But I am also certain that if this killed her, she would be unperturbed.’
Levin agreed. Marina did not seem to be the least bit scared of death. Would Lydia have preferred to die? The thought struck him like a blow. Maybe she would have preferred to die. Maybe she had planned on death. Maybe there had been several scenarios and when she signed the legal papers, she had never really imagined anything being necessary other than her will.
Perhaps she hadn’t only given him his freedom because it was the best thing to do for him. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to face this either. Perhaps she had imagined she could run away from herself, cut herself off from all she had lost. Cut herself off from him, the one person who loved her more than anyone else. Perhaps she wasn’t being brave on her own out there in the Hamptons. Perhaps she was frightened. Perhaps, for once in her life, Lydia was out of her depth. Perhaps she really needed him, but had no way of letting him know. Hal was right. He did have choices. But maybe Lydia didn’t. She’d signed over her choices. She’d insisted that she could do it on her own.
He thought of all the times she’d never called a plumber because she could fix the pipe. For a girl with an impressive trust fund, she wanted to be the one to design the new kitchen in their Columbia apartment and source all the fittings. She had repaired tiles in the bathroom. She had replaced lighting and wallpapered walls. In her work she employed endless professionals, but in her own life, she had been ruthlessly independent.
What had she needed him for? The warm body in the bed? The familiar voice on the end of the phone when she rang from Buenos Aires or Madrid? Someone to complete the picture when she and Alice went out in public? School functions. Openings and award ceremonies. Sex?
No, it was much more than that. He wasn’t going to dismiss twenty-four years. ‘You are my music,’ she had said, as he played piano when she came home from work.
And she had been his. Kissing Lydia had resonated in every cell in his body. But somehow they had stopped kissing like that. Sometimes he was afraid of this confident woman he’d married. Sometimes he felt too small for her. There had been times, making love, when he had thought that if he kissed her, really kissed her, he’d disappear entirely.
Did she fantasise about other men when they made love? He was too afraid to ask. Had she been faithful to him? He didn’t know. Despite all the travelling, she always came home to him and wanted him.
Had he been unfaithful to her? Yes—twice. Years ago on a skiing trip to Aspen with Tom after he’d sniffed God knew what up his nose. It embarrassed him to think about it, all over and done in seconds. He couldn’t remember her face; only the brickwork under his fingers as he clung to the wall in a dark corner of the garden. Another time, a man he’d only just met had given him a blow job. It was an LA party that time, another night of powdered lubricant and a dark bathroom. He had been so young. He’d refused drugs after that. Never told Lydia about either event. Hidden it away and hoped he didn’t get Alzheimer’s and start confessing it one day.
He missed the warm languor of Lydia’s mouth and her tongue winding and weaving into and around him. He missed looking into her eyes and seeing her smile. He missed them finding together the place where flesh became heat and release. And soul, he thought, though he had never liked the word. What sounded religious, but wasn’t, was that he’d had faith in their marriage. He had never imagined the simple commitment to love Lydia would become so complicated.
If two people were holding on to a rock face and one of them lost faith, wasn’t it up to the other person to tell them everything was going to be alright? Maybe Lydia was on a rock face in the Hamptons. She had told him to climb the rope. Climb, Arky, climb! She wanted him to save himself. And he had. He had climbed up. But she was still down there. Maybe she was waiting for him. Maybe she was waiting for him to come back and haul her up. Or at least be there to say goodbye when she fell. Maybe she’d been holding on all this time, wondering when he’d put his head over the cliff and say, ‘I’m here. I’m back with help.’
IN THE DARKNESS, DANICA ABRAMOVIĆ perused the retrospective, observing the list of implements from the performance in Naples in 1972. Gun. Bullet. Blue paint. Comb. Bell. Whip. Pocket knife. Bandage. White paint. Scissors. Bread. Wine. Honey. Shoes. Chair. Metal spear. Box of razor blades. Coat. Sheet of white paper. Hat. Pen.
Seventy-two items in all.
Feather. Polaroid camera. Drinking glass. Mirror. Flowers. Matches.
And the instructions: There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
When she had first heard of it, this shocking thing her daughter had done, giving the audience this opportunity to harm her, Danica had been devastated.
‘It’s too much. Why would you do this?’ she had asked Marina.
‘I have to understand.’
‘Understand what? Enough that already you nearly die inside the star, nearly burn to death here in Belgrade, but now you must nearly get yourself killed in Italy as well?’
‘I had to do it.’
‘You gave them knives, a loaded gun?’
‘I didn’t load the gun. The bullet was separate. They had to make the choice to put the bullet in the chamber.’
‘Hold a gun to my head! Pull the trigger. Let’s see what will happen?’ Danica had been shouting by then.
‘No.’ Marina had almost whispered it. Her head down. ‘That is not art! It is not art!’ Danica had shouted.
A lot of mothers have daughters they did not understand. How many times Danica had come upon her colleagues discussing the latest thing Marina had done. The talk died as she entered the room.
Once Marina had said, ‘The fear frees me. You taught me that.’ And she had put her head on Danica’s shoulder like a normal daughter and they had laughed.
But there was a war inside Marina. Later Danica had asked her, ‘Why make more violence, when there is enough coming in the world without you laying a table with such weapons?’
‘You see the people in the pictures,’ Marina had said. ‘Every one of them was forced to think. They were drawn into the actions of the group—like soldiers. You know all about that.’
‘You take orders. You comply.’
‘I gave them their orders. They did comply. They will not forget the room and who they were when they realised what they were capable of. There were men who came out of that room and knew themselves as vicious. Women who were sure they were not until they had the opportunity to urge the men on. And when it was over and I started to walk around, they ran away. They were embarrassed, frightened of me. Frightened of themselves. They can never pretend violence was something they would not participate in.’
Danica had shaken her head. ‘It’s not right, Marina. This life you are choosing. It shames me.’
‘They could have chosen bread, wine,
oil,’ she said. ‘Honey, cake, flowers.’
‘Did you really think they would massage you, drink to your health?’ Danica had sighed, sat down, rubbed her forehead. ‘Remember Rochefort, the French lawyer? “I don’t deny that my client was carrying a bomb. But this doesn’t prove he was going to use it. After all, I myself always carry with me all I’d need to commit a rape.” How disappointed you would have been by a room full of pacifists.’
And then Marina had surprised her. She said, ‘I never thought they might kill me.’
‘But . . .’
‘I understand that now.’
And then she had left Belgrade to be with that German. Danica could never accept a German.
And in the end it hadn’t worked out. They had done that walk in China. Some sort of grand romantic gesture. She understood that too. Three thousand miles was barely enough to let someone go. She would have done anything for Vojo. Even killed him if it meant he would love her forever. And whether anyone else knew it, she knew that was what Marina had done. She had made that man hers forever. What other woman would ever live up to her? What other woman would walk three thousand miles for him?
Danica sniffed in the quiet way ghosts do.
WHEN ARNOLD KEEBLE EXPRESSED HIS interest in sitting with Marina Abramović, he had been invited to join the VIPs in the green room for the 10.30 start. Ushered into the atrium at 10.25, Keeble was surprised at the intensity of the crowd in the foyer below. A tornado of voices was issuing up the stairs. He could hear someone with a repetitive, irritating laugh and overexcited conversation banging on the white walls. The actor James Franco was with him. They had been introduced in the green room. He admired Franco—particularly his new book of short stories—and told him so. Franco seemed pleased. He had offered Keeble the first sitting. Keeble wondered, as he sat down, if Marina would give any indication of recognising him.