by Auster, Paul
For the past couple of months, Katya and I have spent our days watching movies together. Side by side on the living room sofa, staring at the television set, knocking off two, three, even four films in a row, then breaking for dinner with Miriam, and once dinner has been eaten, returning to the sofa for another film or two before going to bed. I should be working on my manuscript, the memoir I promised to write for Miriam after I retired three years ago, the story of my life, the family history, a chronicle of a vanished world, but the truth is I’d rather be on the sofa with Katya, holding her hand, letting her rest her head on my shoulder, feeling my mind grow numb from the endless parade of images dancing across the screen. For over a year I went at it every day, building up a hefty pile of pages, about half the story I’d guess, perhaps a little more, but now I seem to have lost the stomach for it. Maybe it started when Sonia died, I don’t know, the end of married life, the loneliness of it all, the fucking loneliness after I lost her, and then I cracked up that rented car, destroying my leg, nearly killing myself in the process, maybe that added to it as well: the indifference, the feeling that after seventy-two years on this earth, who gives a damn if I write about myself or not? It was never anything that interested me, not even when I was young, and I certainly never had any ambition to write a book. I liked to read them, that was all, to read books and then write about them afterward, but I was always a sprinter, never a long-distance man, a greyhound working on deadline for forty years, an expert at cranking out the seven-hundred-word piece, the fifteen-hundred-word piece, the twice-weekly column, the occasional magazine assignment, how many thousands of them did I vomit forth? Decades of ephemera, mounds of burned-up and recycled newsprint, and unlike most of my colleagues, I never had the slightest inclination to collect the good ones, assuming there were any, and republish them in books that no sane person would bother to read. Let my half-finished manuscript go on gathering dust for now. Miriam is hard at it, coming to the end of her biography of Rose Hawthorne, squeezing in her hours at night, on the weekends, on the days when she doesn’t have to drive to Hampton to teach her courses, and for the time being maybe one writer in the house is enough.
Where was I? Owen Brick … Owen Brick walking down the road to the city. The cold air, the confusion, a second civil war in America. A prelude to something, but before I figure out what to do with my befuddled magician, I need a few moments to reflect on Katya and the films, since I still can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. When she started ordering the DVDs through the Internet, I took it as a sign of progress, a small step in the right direction. If nothing else, it showed me that she was willing to let herself be distracted, to think about something other than her dead Titus. She’s a film student, after all, training to become an editor, and when the DVDs started pouring into the house, I wondered if she wasn’t thinking about going back to school or, if not school, then furthering her education on her own. After a while, though, I began to see this obsessive movie watching as a form of self-medication, a homeopathic drug to anesthetize herself against the need to think about her future. Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, whereas you can watch a film—and even enjoy it—in a state of mindless passivity. That said, I don’t mean to suggest that Katya has turned herself into a stone. She smiles and sometimes even emits a small laugh during the funny scenes in comedies, and her tear ducts have frequently been active during the touching scenes in dramas. It has more to do with her posture, I think, the way she slumps back on the sofa with her feet stretched out on the coffee table, unmoving for hours on end, refusing to stir herself even to pick up the phone, showing little or no signs of life except when I’m touching or holding her. It’s probably my fault. I’ve encouraged her to lead this flattened-out existence, and maybe I should put a stop to it—although I doubt she’d listen to me if I tried.
On the other hand, some days are better than others. Each time we finish a movie, we talk about it for a little while before Katya puts on the next one. I usually want to discuss the story and the quality of the acting, but her remarks tend to focus on the technical aspects of the film: the camera setups, the editing, the lighting, the sound, and so on. Just tonight, however, after we watched three consecutive foreign films—Grand Illusion, The Bicycle Thief, and The World of Apu—Katya delivered some sharp and incisive comments, sketching out a theory of filmmaking that impressed me with its originality and acumen.
Inanimate objects, she said.
What about them? I asked.
Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. That’s the language of film. Only good directors understand how to do it, but Renoir, De Sica, and Ray are three of the best, aren’t they?
No doubt.
Think about the opening scenes of The Bicycle Thief. The hero is given a job, but he won’t be able to take it unless he gets his bicycle out of hock. He goes home feeling sorry for himself. And there’s his wife outside their building, lugging two heavy buckets of water. All their poverty, all the struggles of this woman and her family are contained in those buckets. The husband is so wrapped up in his own troubles, he doesn’t bother to help her until they’re halfway to the door. And even then, he only takes one of the buckets, leaving her to carry the other. Everything we need to know about their marriage is given to us in those few seconds. Then they climb the stairs to their apartment, and the wife comes up with the idea to pawn their bed linens so they can redeem the bicycle. Remember how violently she kicks the bucket in the kitchen, remember how violently she opens the bureau drawer. Inanimate objects, human emotions. Then we’re at the pawnshop, which isn’t a shop, really, but a huge place, a kind of warehouse for unwanted goods. The wife sells the sheets, and after that we see one of the workers carry their little bundle to the shelves where pawned items are stored. At first, the shelves don’t seem very high, but then the camera pulls back, and as the man starts climbing up, we see that they go on and on and on, all the way to the ceiling, and every shelf and cubby is crammed full of bundles identical to the one the man is now putting away, and all of a sudden it looks as if every family in Rome has sold their bed linens, that the entire city is in the same miserable state as the hero and his wife. In one shot, Grandpa. In one shot we’re given a picture of a whole society living at the edge of disaster.
Not bad, Katya. The wheels are turning …
It just hit me tonight. But I think I’m on to something, since I saw examples in all three films. Remember the dishes in Grand Illusion?
The dishes?
Right near the end. Gabin tells the German woman that he loves her, that he’ll come back for her and her daughter when the war is over, but the troops are closing in now, and he and Dalio have to try to cross the border into Switzerland before it’s too late. The four of them have a last meal together, and then the moment comes to say good-bye. It’s all very moving, of course. Gabin and the woman standing in the doorway, the possibility that they’ll never see each other again, the woman’s tears as the men vanish into the night. Renoir then cuts to Gabin and Dalio running through the woods, and I’d bet money that every other director in the world would have stayed with them until the end of the film. But not Renoir. He has the genius—and when I say genius, I mean the understanding, the depth of heart, the compassion—to go back to the woman and her little daughter, this young widow who has already lost her husband to the madness of war, and what does she have to do? She has to go back into the house and confront the dining room table and the dirty dishes from the meal they’ve just eaten. The men are gone now, and because they’re gone, those dishes have been transformed into a sign of their absence, the lonely suffering of women when men go off to war, and one by one, without saying a word, she picks up the dishes and clears the table. How long does the scene last? Ten seconds? Fifteen seconds? No time at all, but it takes your breath away, doesn’t it? It just knocks the stuffing out of you.
You’re a brave girl, I said, suddenly thinking about Titus.
Stop it, Grandpa. I don’t want to talk about him. Some other time, maybe, but not now. Okay?
Okay. Let’s stick to the movies. There’s still one to go. The Indian film. I think it’s the one I liked best.
That’s because it’s about a writer, Katya said, cracking a brief, ironic smile.
Maybe. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.
I wouldn’t have chosen it unless it was good. No junk. That’s the rule, remember? All sorts of movies, from the wacky to the sublime, but no junk.
Agreed. But where’s the inanimate object in Apu?
Think.
I don’t want to think. It’s your theory, so you tell me.
The curtains and the hairpin. A transition from one life into another, the turning point of the story. Apu has gone to the country to attend his friend’s cousin’s wedding. A traditional arranged marriage, and when the bridegroom shows up, he turns out to be an idiot, a blithering numskull. The wedding is called off, and the friend’s cousin’s parents begin to panic, afraid their daughter will be cursed for life if she doesn’t get married that afternoon. Apu is asleep somewhere under the trees, not a care in the world, happy to be out of the city for a few days. The girl’s family approaches him. They explain that he’s the only available unmarried man, that he’s the only one who can solve the problem for them. Apu is appalled. He thinks they’re nuts, a bunch of superstitious country bumpkins, and refuses to go along. But then he mulls it over for a while and decides to do it. As a good deed, as an altruistic gesture, but he has no intention of taking the girl back to Calcutta with him. After the wedding ceremony, when they’re finally alone together for the first time, Apu learns that this meek young woman is a lot tougher than he thought she was. I’m poor, he says, I want to be a writer, I have nothing to offer you. I know, she says, but that makes no difference, she’s determined to go with him. Exasperated, flummoxed, but also moved by her resolve, Apu reluctantly gives in. Cut to the city. A carriage pulls up in front of the ramshackle building where Apu lives, and he and his bride step out. All the neighbors come to gawk at the beautiful girl as Apu leads her up the stairs to his squalid little garret. A moment later, he’s called away by someone and leaves. The camera stays on the girl, alone in this strange room, this strange city, married to a man she hardly knows. Eventually, she walks to the window, which has a cruddy piece of burlap hanging over it instead of a real curtain. There’s a hole in the burlap, and she looks through the hole into the backyard, where a baby in diapers is toddling along through the dust and debris. The camera angle reverses, and we see her eye through the hole. Tears are falling from that eye, and who can blame her for feeling overwrought, scared, lost? Apu reenters the room and asks her what’s wrong. Nothing, she says, shaking her head, nothing at all. Then we fade to black, and the big question is: what next? What’s in store for this unlikely couple who wound up marrying each other by pure accident? With a few deft and decisive strokes, everything is revealed to us in less than a minute. Object number one: the window. We fade in, it’s early morning, and the first thing we see is the window the girl was looking through in the previous scene. But the ratty burlap is gone, replaced by a pair of clean checkered curtains. The camera pulls back a little, and there’s object number two: potted flowers on the windowsill. These are encouraging signs, but we can’t be sure what they mean yet. Domesticity, homeyness, a woman’s touch, but this is what wives are supposed to do, and just because Apu’s wife has carried out her duties well doesn’t prove that she cares for him. The camera continues pulling back, and we see the two of them asleep in bed. The alarm clock rings, and the wife climbs out of bed as Apu groans and buries his head in the pillow. Object number three: her sari. After she gets out of bed and starts walking off, she suddenly can’t move—because her clothes are tied to Apu’s. Very odd. Who could have done this—and why? The expression on her face is both peeved and amused, and we instantly know that Apu was responsible. She returns to the bed, thwacks him gently on the butt, and then unties the knot. What does this moment say to me? That they’re having good sex, that a sense of playfulness has developed between them, that they’re really married. But what about love? They seem to be contented, but how strong are their feelings for each other? That’s when object number four appears: the hairpin. The wife leaves the frame to prepare breakfast, and the camera closes in on Apu. He finally manages to open his eyes, and as he yawns and stretches and rolls around in bed, he sees something in the crevice between the two pillows. He reaches in and pulls out one of his wife’s hairpins. That’s the crowning moment. He holds up the hairpin and studies it, and when you look at Apu’s eyes, the tenderness and adoration in those eyes, you know beyond a doubt that he’s madly in love with her, that she’s the woman of his life. And Ray makes it happen without using a single word of dialogue.
Same with the dishes, I said. Same with the bundle of sheets. No words.
No words needed, Katya replied. Not when you know what you’re doing.
There’s another thing about those three scenes. I wasn’t aware of it while we were watching the films, but listening to you describe them now, it jumped right out at me.
What?
They’re all about women. How women are the ones who carry the world. They take care of the real business while their hapless men stumble around making a hash of things. Or else just lie around doing nothing. That’s what happens after the hairpin. Apu looks across the room at his wife, who’s crouching down over a pot making breakfast, and he doesn’t make a move to help her. In the same way the Italian guy doesn’t notice how hard it is for his wife to carry those water buckets.
At last, Katya said, giving me a small poke in the ribs. A man who gets it.
Let’s not exaggerate. I’m just adding a footnote to your theory. Your very astute theory, I might add.
And what kind of husband were you, Grandpa?
Just as distracted and lazy as the jokers in those films. Your grandmother did everything.
That’s not true.
Yes, it is. When you were with us, I was always on my best behavior. You should have seen us when we were alone.
* * *
I pause for a moment to shift my position in bed, to adjust the pillow, to take a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table. I don’t want to start thinking about Sonia. It’s still too early, and if I let myself go now, I’ll wind up brooding about her for hours. Stick to the story. That’s the only solution. Stick to the story, and then see what happens if I make it to the end.
Owen Brick. Owen Brick on his way to the city of Wellington, in which state he doesn’t know, in which part of the country he doesn’t know, but because of the dampness and chill in the air, he suspects that he’s in the north, perhaps New England, perhaps New York State, perhaps somewhere in the Upper Midwest, and then, remembering Sarge Serge’s talk about a civil war, he wonders what the fighting is about and who is fighting whom. Is it North against South again? East against West? Red against Blue? White against Black? Whatever caused the war, he tells himself, and whatever issues or ideas happen to be at stake, none of it makes any sense. How can this be America if Tobak knows nothing about Iraq? Utterly at a loss, Brick reverts to his earlier speculation that he is trapped in a dream, that in spite of the physical evidence around him, he is lying next to Flora in his bed at home.
Visibility is poor, but through the fog Brick can dimly apprehend that he is flanked by woods on both sides, that there are no houses or buildings anywhere in sight, no telephone poles, no traffic signs, no indication of human presence except the road itself, a badly paved stretch of tar and asphalt with numerous cracks and potholes, no doubt unrepaired for years. He walks on for a mile, then another mile, and still no cars drive past, no people emerge from the emptiness. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, he hears something approaching him, a clanking, whooshing sound that he is at pains to identify. Out of the fog, a man
on a bicycle comes pedaling toward him. Brick raises his hand to catch the man’s attention, calls out Hello, Please, Sir, but the cyclist ignores him and scoots on past. After a while, more people on bicycles start showing up, some riding in one direction, some in the other, but for all the notice they pay to Brick as he urges them to stop, he might as well be invisible.
Five or six miles farther down the road, signs of life begin to appear—or rather signs of former life: burned-out houses, collapsed food markets, a dead dog, several exploded cars. An old woman dressed in tattered clothes and pushing a shopping cart filled with her possessions suddenly looms up in front of him.
Excuse me, Brick says. Could you tell me if this is the road to Wellington?
The woman stops and looks at Brick with uncomprehending eyes. He notes a small tuft of whiskers sprouting from her chin, her wrinkled mouth, her gnarled, arthritic hands. Wellington? she says. Who asked you?
No one asked me, Brick says. I’m asking you.