by John Berger
In 1946 when the war was over, Berthe insisted upon leaving New York and coming back to the house in Paris: Somewhere my son’s alive, I feel it, she said, and when he’s released he’ll go to the house in Boulogne-Billancourt to find me, and if I’m not there when he arrives, we’ll never meet again on this earth.
She came back alone, and she had to wait fourteen years for André to return and to sleep again in the room made to his measure when he was a boy. By that time he was forty-five, he had spent twenty-seven years in the Gulag and he had been transferred one hundred and twenty-four times.
The son looked after the mother till she died. In Paris he earned his living selling life-insurance policies.
One of the first things he did on his return was to put a tennis ball into a net bag and hang it on a tree, 20 centimetres from the ground. It was for his mother’s cats to play with. It is still hanging there.
Packing one of the cardboard boxes, he finds a water-colour, pauses and holds it out at arm’s length. It’s better than I thought when I did it, he says, do you want it? The water-colour shows an alpine chalet in summertime. Around the chalet stand stooks of hay. It was clearly done, like a child’s painting, from imagination, not on the spot. Yes, I’d like it.
I’ll sign it, he says, and on the reverse side of the paper, in large loose script, he writes: ‘My dear John – in recollection of my marvellous August holidays, 1905, spent in your mountain chalet – André.’
As he writes he bites his lip to stop himself laughing out loud and spoiling the joke. In 1905 none of us had been born and none of us had been transferred even once.
[10]
A Woman on a Bicycle
The bulbs in their bowl on the kitchen windowsill are putting out shoots. Sometimes the shoots of potatoes, motivated as gimlets, thrust their way through cardboard and even wood in their search for light when spring comes. If the bulbs on the windowsill are the same as she sent last year, they will flower as miniature narcissi. Each flower no larger than a thumbnail. With a sweetly pungent perfume – almost like that of a dying animal. Flowers of the north. Reindeer flowers.
In the kitchen cupboard there’s a home-made honey cake which she also sent. Heaven knows what the recipe is. Like a treacle tart, but instead of treacle, a mixture of honey and grated nuts. Perhaps hazel nuts? Anyway, the last nuts one might find when travelling north to Lapland.
On the table are some African toffees. I may be wrong. It may be that only the wicker casket the toffees are in came from Africa. (There was a label inside which said Uganda.) The toffees themselves, each one wrapped evidently by hand, soft and black, were more likely made in her kitchen in Göteborg.
It is also thanks to her that, a few years ago, I discovered Torgny Lindgren. In one of the parcels she sent she included Mehrab’s Beauty – the best story ever written about a cow. After this I read everything by Lindgren. In the letter inside the parcel she wrote:
I am sitting on the ferry for Denmark. We are leaving Göteborg through the long harbour passage – oil depots – everything is changed. The inner harbour is in a way dead, no shipbuilding any more, only those big ‘hotel-ferries’ for Denmark and Germany, all private. I hate to travel by these ‘sea-hotels’ but it is the only possibility – and I always go as a ‘free passenger’. I hurry on board at the very last minute with my bike and no ticket! It’s a gloomy sky, about -4C. In the north, where I was born, I heard on the radio it’s -30C.
This was the woman who, one April afternoon, was riding a bicycle along a narrow country road near the Lac du Bourget, not far from Aix-les-Bains. The lake is famous because of the poem of Lamartine:
Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages,
Dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour,
Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l’océan des âges
Jeter l’ancre un seul jour?
The bicycle was one of those upright models such as elderly professors ride in university towns. And she indeed is a teacher: she teaches Swedish literature to refugee students – particularly Iranians and Ugandans. The bicycle, however, had been transformed. Not by changing its handlebars, saddle or pedals: all its parts were the same, even the brake fittings, each one like a snaffle bit from a horse’s bridle. The transformation was the result of what the bike carried. The rear mudguard was draped, like a camel’s loins, with saddle bags. A tent, an umbrella and a water bottle were strapped on to the back carrier. In the front basket, under the battery lamp, were maps, lotions, a bag of dried figs, candles, a hammer and a new book by Lindgren.
This woman with curly grey hair was pedalling slowly along a narrow country road near the Lac du Bourget, slowly but everlastingly. A black Peugeot 605 approached, driving in the same direction as the woman on the bicycle. The Peugeot driver was telephoning one of his partners. He miscalculated the narrowness of the lane and the rear of the car brushed against the cyclist’s right saddle bag. This precipitated both bicycle and rider into the ditch.
The car didn’t stop. For an accident, a collision, to be registered, a certain weight has to be involved. Nobody thinks of stopping when a butterfly hits the windscreen. And the shock felt in the Peugeot was no greater than that.
The woman swore, picked herself up and examined the damage. First to her bicycle, then to herself. The front wheel was buckled and the left pedal was hurt. As for herself, she had a cut on her knee. The skin of her legs was smooth, almost like marble. Perhaps a lifetime’s wading in sea water might have this effect on the skin. The flowing blood was dark. She tied a rag around her knee and sat on the edge of the road to wait for the next motorist. It was a baker’s van. The driver stopped and took her to Yenne. There her bicycle could be repaired.
The next morning when, with a new front wheel and a bandaged knee, she took to the road, coming north, it began to rain.
She was wearing a waterproof army cape when she arrived in the village. I was first struck by her blue eyes. They say blue eyes age less than dark ones. And the eyes in her weathered face were those of a young girl. Later I learnt that she had been married and had two grown-up children. We hung up her shirt to dry over the kitchen stove and we ate soup and cheese. Afterwards she unbandaged her knee and I saw the little wound.
It’ll be healed in three days, she said.
She went outside, rummaged in the front basket of her bicycle, and held out a jam jar.
Some quince jelly, she announced, it’s for you. I’ll be going, but first, if I may, I’ll take a little walk.
She leant her bicycle against the outdoor stairs. When she came back half an hour later, she had a package of primroses with their roots which she carefully arranged in her front basket.
It’s a bit late now to go so far, I said.
Sometimes I ride by night.
You’re not frightened?
I have my bicycle!
When she started off down the road, she waved but did not look back. She was pedalling slowly and everlastingly. A vagrant with no need to beg but a need to give.
[11]
A Man Begging in the Métro
It’s all a question of time, he says.
I watch him. He is eighty-six and he looks much younger, as if he had a special contract with time passing. His eyes are an intense pale blue, and from time to time they twitch, as a dog’s muzzle twitches when investigating a scent. It’s hard to watch his eyes without feeling you’re being indelicate. They’re totally exposed – not through innocence, but through an addiction to observation. If eyes are windows on to the soul, his have neither panes nor curtains, and he stands in the window frame and you can’t see past his gaze.
Monet and Renoir, he says, painted the view from this window here. They were friends of Victor Chocquet who lived in the flat below.
Chocquet, the man Cézanne painted a portrait of, with a gentle thin face and a beard? I say.
Yes, he says, Cézanne painted several portraits of Chocquet. Here’s a reproduction of the Monet of the Palais Royal. You see how the spire the
re nicks into the dome, closer than a tangent? Now look out of the window. It’s the same. He painted from exactly this spot … Photography doesn’t interest me any more.
If he was an animal, I think he’d be a hare; all the time he’s on the point of bounding away. Not in flight. Not in mockery. But casually, for the hell of it. Instead of ears which bring him the news about everything, he has eyes. Amused eyes.
The only thing about photography that interests me, he says, is the aim, the taking aim.
Like a marksman?
Do you know the Zen Buddhist treatise on archery?
Georges Braque gave it to me in ’43. I’m afraid not.
It’s a state of being, a question of openness, of forgetting yourself.
You don’t aim blind?
No, there’s the geometry. Change your position by a millimetre and the geometry changes.
What you call geometry is aesthetics?
Not at all. It’s like what mathematicians and physicists call elegance, when they’re discussing a theory. If an approach is elegant it may be getting near to what’s true.
And the geometry?
The geometry comes in because of the Golden Section. But calculation is useless. Like Cézanne said: ‘When I start thinking, everything’s lost.’ What counts in a photo is its plenitude and its simplicity.
I notice the small camera on the table beside him, within easy reach.
I gave up photography twenty years ago, he says, to go back to painting and above all to drawing. Yet people keep on asking me about photography. A while back I was offered an award for my ‘creative career as a photographer’. I told them I didn’t believe in such a career. Photography is pressing a trigger, bringing your finger down at the right moment.
He imitates the gesture comically in front of his nose. And, as I laugh, I remember the Zen Buddhist tradition of teaching by jokes, of refusing anything ponderous.
Nothing is lost, he says, all that you have ever seen is always with you.
Did you ever want to be a pilot?
Now it’s his turn to laugh because I’ve guessed right.
I was doing my military service in the Air Force, stationed at Le Bourget. Not far away, towards Paris, was the family factory. The well-known Cartier-Bresson reels of cotton! So they knew I was the kid son of a bourgeois. I was put to sweeping out the hangars with a broom. Then I had to fill out a form. Did I want to be an officer? No. Academic achievements? None, I wrote, because I hadn’t passed my baccalauréat. What were my first impressions of military service? I replied by quoting two lines from Jean Cocteau:
Don’t go to so much trouble
the sky belongs to us all …
This, I thought, expressed how I wanted to be a pilot.
I was called before the commanding officer who asked me what the hell I meant. I said I was quoting the poet Jean Cocteau. Cocteau what? he shouted. He went on to warn me that, if I wasn’t pretty careful, I’d be drafted to Africa in a disciplinary battalion. As it was, I was put into a punishment squad in Le Bourget.
He has picked up the camera and is looking at me – or, rather, around me, as if I had an aura, as he speaks.
When I was demobilised, I went to the Ivory Coast and earned my living there hunting game. I used to shoot at night with a lamp on my head like a coal miner. There were two of us, and my companion was an African. Then I fell ill with blackwater fever. I’d have certainly died but I was saved by my brother hunter who was skilled, like a medicine man, in the use of herbs. He had already poisoned a white woman because she was too arrogant. Me, he saved. He nursed me back to life …
As he tells me this story, it reminds me of other stories I’ve heard and read about lost travellers being brought back to life by nomads and hunters. When they’re brought back, they’re not the same. Their sign has been changed by an initiation. The following year, Cartier-Bresson bought his first Leica. Within a decade he was famous.
The geometry, he is now saying, comes from what’s there, it’s given to one, if one is in a position to see it.
He puts down the camera he was pointing at me without using it.
I want to ask you something, I say, please be patient.
Me? I can’t help it. I’m impatient.
The instant of taking a picture, I persist, ‘the decisive moment’ as you’ve called it, can’t be calculated or predicted or thought about. OK. But it can easily be lost, can’t it?
Of course, for ever. He smiles.
So what indicates the decisive split-second?
I prefer to talk about drawing. Drawing is a form of meditation. In a drawing you add line to line, bit to bit, but you’re never quite sure what the whole is going to be. A drawing is an always unfinished journey towards a whole …
All right, I reply, but taking a photograph is the opposite. You feel the moment of a whole when it comes, without even knowing what all the parts are! The question I want to ask is: Does this ‘feeling’ come from a hyper-alertness of all your senses, a kind of sixth sense –
The third eye! He puts in.
– or is it a message from what is in front of you?
He chuckles – like hares do in folk tales – and leaps away to look for something. He comes back holding a photocopy.
Here’s my answer – by Einstein.
The quotation has been copied out in his own handwriting. I read the words. They are taken from a letter of Einstein’s addressed to the wife of the physicist Max Born in October ’44. ‘I have such a feeling of solidarity with everything alive that it doesn’t seem to me important to know where the individual ends or begins …’
That’s an answer! I say. Yet I’m thinking about something different. I’m thinking about his handwriting. It’s large, easy to read, open, rounded, continuous, and surprising.
When you look through the view-finder, he says, whatever you see, you see naked.
His handwriting is surprising because it’s maternal, it couldn’t be more maternal. Somewhere this virile man who was a hunter, who was co-founder of the most prestigious photo-agency in the world, who escaped three times from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, who is a maverick anarchist and Buddhist, somewhere this man’s heart is that of a mother.
Check it with his photos, I tell myself. Check it against the men in bowler hats, the abattoir workers, the lovers, the drunks, the refugees, the tarts, the judges, the picnickers, the animals and, on every continent, the kids, above all the kids.
Only a mother can be that unsentimental and love without illusion, I conclude. Maybe his instinct for the decisive moment is like a mother’s instinct for her offspring, visceral and immediate. And who really knows whether this is instinct or message?
Of course the heart, maternal or otherwise, doesn’t explain everything. There’s also the discipline, the persistent training of the eye. He shows me a painting by Louis, his favourite uncle, a professional artist who was killed in Flanders during the First World War, aged twenty-five. We examine other drawings by his father and grandfather. Topographical landscapes of places they found themselves in. A family tradition, passed from generation to generation, of minutely observing branches and patiently drawing leaves. Like embroidery, but with a male, lead pencil.
When he was nineteen, Henri went to study with André Lhote, the Cubist master. And there he learnt about angles, walls and the way things tilt.
Some of the drawings, I say to him, some of your still lifes and Paris street-scenes make me think of Alberto Giacometti. It’s not an influence so much as the two of you sharing something. You both share, in your drawings, a way of squeezing between a table and a chair, or between a wall and a car. It’s not you physically, of course. It’s your vision that slips through to the other side, to the back –
Alberto! he interrupts. Despite all the hell of this life, a man like him makes you realise it’s worth being alive. Yes, we slip through …
He has picked up his camera and is looking at what is around me again. This time he clicks.
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Slipping through, he says. Take coincidences, there’s no end to them. Maybe it’s thanks to them we glimpse an underlying order … The world has become intolerable today, worse than the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century ended in about 1955, I think. Before, there was hope …
He has bounded away again to the edge of the field.
We look together at a photo he has just taken of the Abbé Pierre. It’s an image which shows the compassion, the fury and the godliness of that remarkable man who fights for the homeless and is the most loved public figure in France. Photographer and priest must be about the same age. A picture of one tireless old man taken by another. And if the Abbé’s mother could see Pierre today, she’d see him, I think, as he is at this instant in this photo.
Finally I say I must leave.
People ask me about my new projects, he says, smiling. What shall I say to them? To make love tonight. To do another drawing this afternoon. To be surprised!
I take the lift down from the apartment on the fifth floor and I think he may do another drawing.
In the Métro I find a seat in a coach which is more than half full. At the end of the coach, a man in his early forties makes a short speech about his handicapped wife whom he is leading by the hand and who follows him with her eyes shut. They’ve been turned out of their lodgings, he says, and they risk to be separated if they apply to any institution.
You don’t know, the man tells the coach, what it’s like loving a handicapped woman – I love her most of the time, I love her at least as much as you love your wives and husbands.
Some passengers give him money. To each one the man says: Merci pour votre sensibilité.
At a certain moment during this scene I suddenly glanced towards the door, expecting him to be there with his Leica. This gesture of mine was instantaneous and without reflection.