Photocopies: Encounters (Vintage International)

by John Berger

  Her left eye sometimes wanders, to become a fraction displaced. At that moment this slight asymmetry was the most precious thing I could see. If I could only touch it, place it, with my stub of charcoal without giving it a name …

  She of course knew I was drawing her. She was sending something out to meet my aim. If what she sent out didn’t miss my aim but touched it, there was a chance of a good drawing.

  I’ve never known what likeness consists of in a portrait. One can see whether it’s there or not, but it remains a mystery. For instance, photos never have a ‘likeness’. The question isn’t even asked about a photo. Likeness has little to do with features or proportions. Maybe it’s what a drawing receives, if two aims touch like the tips of two fingers.

  Gradually the drawn head on the paper did draw closer to hers. Yet now I knew it would never be close enough, for, as can happen when drawing, I had come to love her, to love everything about her, and no drawing, however good, can be more than a trace.

  Sitting there, she told me a joke about the villagers in some country who were so mean that, when they went to bed, they stopped the clocks in their houses because that way the clocks would last longer!

  I began to sense that the evolution of the drawing of her corresponded with another evolution. Each mark or correction I made on the paper was like something bequeathed to her before she was born. The drawing was dredging time. And its traces were, like chromosomes, hereditary ones.

  I elect you as my other father, she said at exactly that moment.

  I drew the hand holding the chin.

  Finally, there was a kind of portrait, most of it rubbed out, which looked to me to be finished, so I handed it to her.

  At first she glanced at it like the Empress Theodora. Then, as she studied it, she became completely herself and only twenty-one years old.

  Can I take it? she asked.

  Yes, Anyishka.

  Two days later she returned to Odessa with her portrait, and I kept this photocopy.

  [7]

  A Man in One-Piece Leathers and a Crash Helmet Stands Very Still

  The British privateer team, Phase One Endurance, riding a Kawasaki TT1, won the 24-hour endurance race at Liège earlier this year. And their first pilot Simon Buckmaster is at the moment placed third, according to points, in the World Endurance Championship. Tonight he could move up to first place. His co-pilots are Steve Manley and Roger Bennett.

  It’s the fourth hour of the Bol d’Or. Manley is racing, and Bennett is waiting in the pit to relieve him. It will be the second time since the start that Bennett will be out there, aiming, climbing over, tearing. Phase One is in seventh place at the moment. It’s hot and so he has undone his one-piece leathers and is stripped to the waist. Out of respect nobody talks to him – any more than one would talk to a man praying.

  To risk everything you have to withdraw from every contact. And if the solitude out there is not going to unnerve you, you have to slip into it early. He sprays water on to his torso and sits. He rotates his head to ease the neck muscles and the hypothalamus which controls saliva and all the adrenalin – for which there’s no pit to refuel in.

  He holds himself apart. The track with its thirteen bends and two zigzags is inscribed in his mind and in his arms like a cord with which you tie and untie knots. He shakes his legs as if shaking off dust. Twenty-six times each lap, whilst cornering, he’ll slide his loins over the saddle, knee ready towards the asphalt. Nobody talks to him.

  A pilot friend enters and wordlessly, carefully, bandages Bennett’s palms with tape to stop blistering. When the friend has gone, he takes the tape off and rebandages his hands. (I think of Glenn Gould wearing woollen mittens and playing Bach on a piano.) He slips plugs into his ears. Pulls on his helmet. Helmeted, at this moment, it is as if you have already left.

  The mechanics place their hydraulic-jack in position, arrange two wheels ready for changing and check the petrol dump-tank. In the pit lane Bennett, helmeted, squats down on his heels in a riding position, his body anticipating the contours of the machine to be mounted. The No. 5, which will be his when he drives himself. Please God.

  On the paddock side of the pits, up against the wire netting to keep the public out, a young woman with a small child in her arms, says: Look at Daddy! The little girl looks and doesn’t react.

  Manley drives in. Says one sentence to Bennett. At that hand-over frontier between pilots only the utterly essential is communicated. Bennett is away.

  Manley comes out of his helmet. The little girl says: Daddy! His face is red, his long hair damp with sweat. Around his eyes there is the temporary disfigurement of any endurance pilot after twenty-five laps: as though the skin has been pulled back from the cheekbones and the eyelids no longer protect the eyes. He comes over to the wire and, pulling off his gloves, gives them to his daughter to play with.

  The white leather over his left shoulder has been roughed and grazed. A few months back, he broke his collar-bone in a fall. Tenderly he touches the wire by his wife’s face and begins to talk.

  Afterwards when they come in, they have to talk because they have to come back out of the helmet. He talks, and later he follows his wife to take an improvised shower.

  Buckmaster is preparing to go out there for the third time. He is alone. Bennett has been overtaken by a Ducati but there are already rumours that the Ducatis won’t hold the pace. Buckmaster puts on his helmet and stands very still, waiting, small, a shearwater looking out to sea from a cliff edge.

  The whine of Bennett coming in. Twenty seconds later the whine of Buckmaster leaving. Nightfall.

  In their marquee the mother of all the Phase One team is cooking supper with a sauce bolognese for pasta. The news comes over the loudspeakers of a double spill – involving the Suzuki No. 3, the favourite in first place, and their own No. 5.

  What happened? Nobody is sure. A racing accident. Here is one described by Sophocles around the year 450 BC:

  At each turn of the lap, Orestes reined in his inner trace-horse and gave the outer its head, so skilfully that his hub just cleared the post by a hair’s breadth every time; and so the poor fellow had safely rounded every lap but one without mishap to himself or his chariot. But at the last he misjudged the turn, slacked his left rein before the horse was safely round the bend, and so fouled the post. The hub was smashed across, and he was hurled over the rail …

  Come out alive from a crash there – it’s a bad place, one of the mechanics in the marquee says, you’re doing 240 km an hour, alive you’re lucky.

  Graziano, the Suzuki pilot, is pushing his bike back to the pits. No. 5 has abandoned the race. Simon Buckmaster has not moved from the rail against which he was thrown.

  A little later the surgeons at the hospital were unable to repair his severed leg; they had to amputate it below the knee.

  [8]

  Two Dogs Under a Rock

  I’ve known Tonio longer than any of my other friends. Almost half a century. Last year after we’d been unloading hay, and, hot and thirsty, were drinking cider with coffee, he began a story.

  I’ve seen Antonin the shepherd cry twice. He was married. He didn’t see much of his wife, shepherds are like soldiers in this way. She died, and he wept when he told me about her death. The second time I saw Antonin weep – well, I’ll tell you.

  The two men were in the valley of El Requenco, just north of Madrid. They never met elsewhere. On a large-scale ordnance map of the area you can find a building marked on the southern slope of the valley and beneath the little square are printed the words ‘Casa Tonio’. Tonio took three years building it. It’s not really a house, more like a cabin. Perched at an altitude of 1,000 metres on a mountainside of broken boulders and ilex trees, perched like a leaning tomb or like a man sitting at a corner of a table. When Tonio gets out of his Fiat van lower down the slope and starts the slow climb up to his cabin he walks exactly like a St Jérôme. He has hermit legs, long, thin, with inexplicably rounded knees, such as all hermits h
ad. Around the cabin there is a dry-stone wall 4 metres high, forming a kind of corral which was built long ago to protect an apiary. Every year in May a lorry loaded with hives came along the dust road and men carried the hives to place them in the corral. For two months the bees made honey there. Otherwise, it is a place only for sheep, goats and lizards.

  In May the gilo’s in flower, says Tonio. The gilo is an ugly shrub but its white blossoms are everywhere like snow. Like manna from heaven.

  Since he has had his pension, Tonio draws a lot in El Requenco. He draws the smashed rocks, the ilex, the sparse turf, the dry beds of torrents. Large black drawings in which he fits everything together as if the coiled surface of the earth at El Requenco were the shell of an immense and ancient tortoise. High above in the sky vultures circle. As he draws, he can hear their faint cries. Cries which imitate as if to encourage the last moans of some animal victim.

  In El Requenco, bovids need shepherds. Antonin is short and square. On his feet he wears sandals cut out of old lorry tyres. Tyres which have been driven through a lot of goat shit. Antonin never learnt to read and has his own way of speaking.

  By ‘the great waters’, he refers to the torrential rain provoked by frequent thunderstorms. He wears a black hat with the same pride as Solomon wore a crown. After days alone in the valley with his herd, the ‘Casa Tonio’ is, for Antonin when he spots it, like a photograph in a frame: a solemn reminder of otherwise forgotten occasions.

  Both men alone in the valley defend themselves fiercely against encroaching intimacy. To smoke a cigarette sitting on one of the terraces where the hives used to stand, to drink a glass of water while they recount what they’ve seen on the mountainside during the last week, nothing more. And often when they sit, looking down the valley, they swear.

  One day Antonin came by when Tonio was preparing a meal: potatoes with bacon. Tonio invited the shepherd to join him. The idea came to him without any reflection. He pronounced the invitation as if recounting a simple fact, like: last night I saw the badger. Antonin indicated his acceptance by taking off his hat and lowering his head. Tonio made a sign to suggest that the two dogs should stay outside.

  When, however, the shepherd crossed the threshold into the single, unique room of the casa, something unforeseen by either of the two men occurred. One knew his way about blindfolded and the other did not. Tonio laid plates on the table, placed knives, forks and glasses beside them, fetched a flask of black wine, brought out the bread. Antonin leant back in his chair, speaking a sentence or two from time to time, talking of torrents, corrals, of names which were unfamiliar to Tonio, but mostly he sat there silent, smiling, like a man having his hair cut in a café on a Sunday morning.

  Tonio cut up tomatoes and trickled olive oil over them. The dogs outside found a place in the shade beneath a rock. When both men were at last seated, Antonin poured wine into their glasses. Otherwise, it was Tonio who served his guest.

  They ate with gusto. Sometimes they’d lean back to talk. When they finished eating they went on drinking the black wine. Through the window, the valley in the afternoon heat looked as cruel as ever. Finally, Antonin put on his hat and, after fumbling for ten minutes in his pocket, he drew out a 1,000-peseta note which he slipped discreetly on to the table.

  You can’t do that! Tonio remonstrated. You can’t! It was my pleasure.

  No man before in my life has ever served me at table, declared Antonin. It was like a great restaurant.

  Pick it up! shouted Tonio. You are spitting on my pleasure.

  Shit … began Antonin.

  The other, with a shaking hand, held out the note across the table. Antonin hid the money in his pocket, took off his hat, and then he stood there, his two arms a little apart from his square body. Between the fingers of his left hand he held an unlit cigarette, with his right he held a hat. He stood there motionless in the cabin and down his cheeks rolled tears.

  Seeing Antonin, Tonio began to weep himself. Neither hid anything. The dogs watched and waited: their master with his back to the door and the other man on his feet as if turned to salt. For many minutes neither man moved. Then they slowly raised their arms and embraced.

  [9]

  A House Designed by Le Corbusier

  André is waiting to leave his house in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. He has always carried this house around in his head as an image of home; and for the last twenty-five years he has actually lived in it. The house, however, belongs to somebody else, a question of American lawyers.

  Another etán! André declares. Perhaps the last, my one hundredth and twenty-fourth! Etán means ‘transfer’ in Russian. It was the word prisoners used in the Gulag when they were moved from one camp to another. Transfers were what the zeks dreaded most, yet they were frequent. The unknown seemed more threatening than the known, even when the latter was intolerable. The body, already exhausted, often found it fatally hard to adapt to different conditions. And with each transfer the little sticks of one’s identity were scattered or broken and had to be reassembled or mended.

  At first André resisted the notice to quit the house in Boulogne-Billancourt and barricaded himself in. Near the heavy metal gate, which gives on to the street, he kept a short-handled Russian spade. With an instrument like this, he said, I’ve seen quite a few beheaded.

  For years he resisted. Then he changed his mind. Today he reckons that, if they find him there when they come, they will destroy everything they can lay their hands on out of spite. None of it is worth selling. You could get nothing for it, he says, but to me these bits and pieces are eloquent. He winks with one of his astute, almond-shaped eyes.

  A removal needs to be planned like an escape, he insists, no detail, however small, is unimportant. Every day he packs papers, bits of cloth, books, drawings, letters, newspaper cuttings, spare parts of God knows what, a plastic bottle for olive oil in the form of a Greek vase which once amused his mother – into cardboard boxes which he numbers. Like this he hopes to escape with everything before the transfer.

  Previously he escaped eight times. And this was a fabulous record in Kolyma. From Boulogne-Billancourt it will be the ninth time. Once on the other side of the wire, he says, it’s not tourism you think about! He’ll be moving into a single room, measuring 5 metres by 3, on a fifth floor.

  The house he has to leave was designed by Le Corbusier in 1923 for Berthe, André’s mother, and his stepfather, a sculptor. With its studio wall of murky glass and the crumbling concrete of its flat roof, it looks today more like an abandoned garage from which the petrol pumps were long since taken away! Nevertheless, it’s a question of American lawyers.

  There is a double portrait of André’s mother and stepfather painted by Modigliani in 1917: Berthe, who came from Moscow, is on the right and Jacques Lipchitz on the left. Sometimes I think I can see in the placing of Berthe’s almond eyes a certain resemblance to André.

  A stranger, judging by appearances, could mistake André for a Renault salesman who retired last year. At seventy-eight he is remarkably spry, wiry and young for his age.

  Inside the house there is a spiral staircase leading to the living quarters. The first room which gives off it is a bedroom, made to measure for André when he was a boy. Over the bed now hangs a painting which depicts a Steppenwolf in the snow. My portrait, jokes André, nodding towards the wolf.

  So it’s my last transfer and it makes me think of my first. Before I knew what transfers meant? I was fourteen. I caught the train from the Gare du Nord, accompanied by Lounatcharski, the People’s Minister of Education! Mother had arranged this. When the train was leaving Berlin, the Minister’s mistress suddenly remembered she hadn’t bought all the underwear she meant to buy – ah! the secret world! – so she stood up, I was there in the same compartment, and she pulled down the chain for an emergency stop. The train jerked to a halt. And the men played cards till she came back with her shopping … Thirty-one years later when I had been rehabilitated and Lounatcharski was dead, I saw
her on my return to Moscow, an old woman in a black dress.

  After Berlin, Warsaw, Brest Litovsk, and Minsk, I arrived in Moscow on the morning of the tenth anniversary. November the 7th, 1927.

  I went straight to the Red Square to watch the military march past, and to see my father for the first time in my life. He was on the podium in his general’s uniform taking the salute! I stared up at him but the temperature was -28 and I could think of nothing except how cold I was. I was dressed as if I was going to the Lycée in Paris – my light suit with plus fours, a fashionable white raincoat with dark amber buttons and a pair of shoes with thick, spongy rubber soles. I was conspicuous and I was frozen to death.

  Some officers behind the podium noticed me and took pity. At that time I didn’t much speak Russian. One of them approached my father and, whispering, asked him what should be done. Wrap him up in a tarpaulin and deliver him to my house! he ordered. And this is what happened. They rolled me into an army-issue tarpaulin, dumped me in a side-car and pushed me through the front door. My stepmother thought I was a new carpet! Eventually she thought she heard the carpet murmuring! Soon afterwards I moved out of their house. For two years I was a vagabond and by the winter of ’30 I was already an enemy of the people. My father the General was executed in ’37.

  Around the house in Boulogne-Billancourt there are many blocks of uncarved stone and marble. Lipchitz left for America in 1940 and never returned. By the back door there’s usually a blue enamel plate brimming over with cat biscuits. For the birds, explains André, they nibble them … you see that cherry tree? It grew by itself one year after Mother died. When she was alive she had a habit of spitting out cherry stones from the living-room window. She particularly liked the Morello cherry.