Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  It seemed a sign that the interminable compilation would continue after the relatively short war ended. Then, in one of the ironies of modern times, petty looters, in the anarchy of the war’s closing, set fire to the bombed structure and destroyed the entire collection.

  In later years, Sander no longer entertained any delusions of completing his portfolios. Yet he continued to work over his remaining negatives. A few later books appeared, refusing to admit that their supporting volumes—the ones that would flesh them out—had been blown away. No longer strong enough to bicycle into the Westerwald, Sander remained at home polishing and refining a few isolated cornices from which we might induce the magnificence of the intended mansion. The awards and accolades continued to pour in until they finally accomplished their intention, rendering him today an honored and almost totally forgotten figure who does not even rate an entry in our larger multivolume encyclopedias. Sander has slipped into semifictional marginalia.

  Clearly Sander’s camera could no more exhaustively document Man of the Twentieth Century than a mechanical planetarium can exhaust the night stars. Yet his work completes itself in failure. The shattered, overambitious, unfinished work seems the best possible vehicle for its undemonstrable subject. From integrations over tens of thousands of mechanically reproduced prints, extant, maliciously destroyed, or never taken, emerges a sitter by turns willing, self-destructive, reticent, demure, but never, not even in the sum of all its unsummable parts, not through naming and categorizing and endless, industrious compilation, never, ultimately, catchable. The incomplete reference book is the most accurate.

  Sander’s work is everywhere shot through with such paradoxes. His embracing the mechanical portrait marks him as modern, as does his rejection of pretty nostalgia. Equating beautified photography with deceit, Sander worked with silver-salt papers that always represented moles as woefully molish. He saw the facts as the century demanded, in stark images of a one-legged Great War veteran, an aged syphilitic, or blind street urchins signing furiously with hands. In a 1927 exhibition credo, he writes:

  We must be able to endure seeing the truth, but above all we should pass it on to our fellow men and to posterity, whether it be favorable or unfavorable to us. Now, if I, as a healthy human being, am so immodest as to see things as they are and not as they are supposed to be or can be, then I beg your pardon, but I can’t act differently. . . . Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age.

  But this very belief that he could get at the objective truth dates him, marks him as an anachronism. The nineteenth century had held to the doctrine of perfectibility. Aside from a few holdouts, most of the thinkers of the last century believed in the upward spiral of rationality, which would at last triumph over the imperfections of nature. Sander forsook such meliorism in favor of dispassionate observation. But the main current of the new century broke with reason altogether, embarking on a course of eclectic irrationality. Even the cold machinery of the camera was turned, by the true moderns, to the cause of surreality, absurdity, and abstraction by such devices as composite doctoring, odd and illusory angles, or trick exposures.

  Sander rejected the innovations of the avant-garde, continuing his single-purposed, conservative work. The guiding metaphysic of his most shockingly modern portraits dates to the medieval pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology, two category disciplines that claimed exact correspondences between facial and skull types and personalities. Sander updated the theory for this century: a good statistical sampling of photos can prove a nervous thinness in the salaried class, saturnine brows on the propertied.

  His family tells of how Sander would chase down an interesting face until the harassed individual threatened to call the police if not left alone. He abandoned a reverence for higher things and turned his lens instead toward the details of the street. His work celebrates the isolated case: a civil servant’s vacuous smile, the tight-lipped, too-fashionable sneer of a socialite, an unemployed vaudevillian warding off hunger with a shrug. The title of a later volume of Sander’s photos, Men Without Masks, betrays his love of the undisguised particular. The widower’s daze and his sons’ sadness are their own best document.

  In a 1931 radio broadcast (the year of Diego’s frescoes) Sander explains:

  More than anything else, physiognomy means an understanding of human nature. . . . We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled. . . . The individual does not make the history of his time, he both impresses himself on it and expresses its meaning. It is possible to record the historical physiognomic image of a whole generation and, with enough knowledge of physiognomy, to make that image speak in photographs. . . . The time and the group sentiment will be especially evident in certain individuals whom we can designate by the term “type.”

  The man obsessed with the involutions of particular faces sought in them the type of our Face-in-General. Sander unmasks the individual only to restore to the denuded figure the mask of the clan. The images in Face of Our Time attempt to remove the obtrusive presence of the photographer in order to call full attention to the photographic object, the face of our time.

  But clinical diagnosticians soon learn that their personalities help fire or defuse their patients’ complaints. The photographer who practiced dispassion and removal becomes instantly recognizable by his absence. Sander, at the same time as those working in physics, psychology, political science, and other disciplines, blundered against and inadvertently helped uncover the principal truth of this century: viewer and viewed are fused into an indivisible whole. To see an object from a distance is already to act on it, to change it, to be changed.

  AFTER WATCHING A thousand encyclopedias and references skip from Zambia to Zanzibar I began to suspect that my Detroit Zander did not exist. The dozen casebooks I took apart suggested that Austrians had made remarkably few contributions to early photography. Because I could not find a second opinion, the photo of the three farmers grew progressively less distinct until it seemed a collection of shapeless gray tones: two, perhaps three men in the year of outbreak of war, one looking vaguely like me. The too-familiar is the last recognized. Paged in a crowded terminal, we remark on the unusual coincidence of someone else being here with our name.

  Day after day, I tried to recall the sense of unsponsored obligation the photo had made in me as I waited for the Technoliner. The moment seemed intent on joining all the others I had lost—those August evenings arguing over love on the darkened lawn, or Saturdays on the fence rails behind a vacant lot, singing to a ladybug that her house was on fire and her children in danger. I was losing the moment of the photograph, losing the photo itself, as if my memory were no better than a bad director who relied too heavily on the slow dissolve.

  I began grabbing for long odds. Between technical assignments at work, I read anything remotely related to that lost day: Fodor on Detroit, Britannica on Rivera and the War. Winter came. I positioned my desk to look out of my upper-story office window onto the Mass. Turnpike. My six-month review judged me satisfactory, with unmet potential. The city government survived a graft scandal. Sixty thousand people in Greater Boston were out of work. I stopped reading the papers. Increasingly interested in finding out about another man of the early century who, like Sander, parlayed a few years of formal education into world renown, I passed, without knowing it, the point where I no longer could recall those three faces.

  SANDER, EVER THE archivist and documenter, kept, for whoever might stumble on them, meticulous records of his own development. In one recollection he writes:

  I put in the plates and began my first photographic tour, to a hilly part of the village from which I photographed the landscape where the mines were. In the evening I developed the plate, but when I finished, a second village was reflected in the clouds. At first I thought I had made a double exposure and was very depressed about the picture. When the plate was dry, I went with it to our v
illage physician and told him what had happened. The doctor said it was not a double exposure but a Fata Morgana—a mirage, a reflection in the air. This was my very first photograph.

  Chapter Five

  Trois Vierges

  The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall. . . .

  —Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

  Three weeks after the brief May affair, Peter Kinder, formerly Dutch of Maastricht, and Hubert, called Minuit, of unknown nationality became officially registered Germans. To simplify a difficult, sometimes impossible process, they acquired German parents. As both boys had parents still living, they had to fabricate deaths for purposes of the adoption.

  In fact, Peter’s mother, the woman who, together with a growing addiction to novelty, had lured Jan Kinder away from Adolphe’s mother, still lived in Holland’s South Limburg Province, just over the German border. Of French extraction, she succeeded in changing the man only to the degree of getting him to answer to “Jean.” She could do nothing to reduce his appetite for change and conquest, a taste that even brought him, for a time, back to his German wife. On each of Jan’s subsequent border incursions back into the Westerwald, Adolphe’s mother continued to yield dutifully to him, in secret, out of the technical obligation of matrimony.

  When the old campaigner died in January of 1914, his Dutch-French consort, Peter’s mother, could no longer see any reason to keep the boy. She applied to Jan’s German wife, who had long before remarried without benefit of divorce. The letter was a combination of plea and innuendo. Adolphe’s mother, unaware that Jan’s death freed her from any threat of bigamy trial, bought the blackmail. Over the feeble objections of her second husband, she opened her home to a new son with all the dumb acceptance she had always shown his father. Falsifying the adoption forms, Peter trusted that his blood mother would accept her official, paper death with the same docility.

  Hubert’s paper lies, on the other hand, lay closer to the truth. Although his mother could be traced and even possessed by any German immigration officer with enough capital and interest, his father was unknown, even to her. She had given the boy the surname Minuit after the Dutch national hero and buyer of Manhattan. For his part, the boy had taken it into his head that his father was some Flemish man of action. Foisted on Peter’s mother before Jan’s death, he had been accepted by her without objection. Coming across the border as a surprise auxiliary clause in the treaty between Jan Kinder’s two women, he was taken in by Adolphe’s mother with a similar silence.

  Europe was rife with such transients, and families stayed continually ready to swap loyalties and annex newcomers. This constant exchange of doorstep obligations drew families of all nations grudgingly closer until, at the turn of the century, miscegenation and ties bound together everyone from these farmers all the way up to the cousins Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Czar Nicholas. Optimists used this interdependence of relatives to prove that European war was impossible.

  But apart from the custom of shifting households, women were naturally inclined to open their doors to the odd child Hubert. Naïveté and geriatric suffering formed so absurd a combination in the boy’s face as to evoke instant empathy. Hubert met the first condition for inspiring love: he gave off an aura of cruelty coupled with basic helplessness. He was at the mercy of others. Many times one or the other of his mère-moeders would catch themselves looking at one of his ineffectual, sadistic acts—chasing a squirrel with a penknife or threatening a town banker with class warfare—and would predict in loud, maternal voice how the world was not meant for old children, how he was due to suffer at society’s hands. For this he would curse them, but mispronouncing the profanity or drooling on himself in his anger, he thereby confirmed them. It was their own laughable callousness these women saw in Hubert and took pity on.

  So in late May two adolescents perjured themselves on notaried paper about the state of their real parents and received ones of a new nationality in exchange. They took the name of their legal father, Schreck, a name Adolphe had already adopted after his mother’s remarriage. In his heart, if not yet consciously, Adolphe, being the oldest of Jan Kinder’s sons, toyed with the idea of changing his name back so that his blood father’s line might not lose its last record.

  The new father of three held part-ownership in a moderately prosperous Westerwald farm. He hedged against the uncertainties of crop raising by investing heavily in British colonial ventures. The new international investing, like the exchange of unwanted children, supposedly drew the Continent together, making it unlikely for any country to sever its own economic interests. But international investment, like international charity, was in its infancy, and it would be some time, if ever, before either presented a good substitute for war.

  The naturalization of the Dutchman and the self-proclaimed Belgian had lain dormant in paneled offices for several months before the adoption. Following the adoption papers, citizenship became all but automatic. On May the twenty-third, the two became German. The change made almost no effect on their long-term appearance, although Peter spoke all day in a thick, indeterminate accent and walked with a limp, imitating what he took to be a commonly recognized German type. Under Peter’s direction, a covert naturalization celebration went on for some time. Farmer Schreck frequently wondered aloud with middle-class inarticulateness why he could not get at least as much roguing out of three strong German adolescents as he had formerly gotten out of one.

  Outwardly at least, Adolphe showed no sign of infection from Peter’s and Hubert’s foreign contagion. He looked on his own seniority—a year and a half over Peter, three years over Hubert—as a grave responsibility. In public, he reprimanded them with the severe kindness of a schoolmaster intent on forging a new Leibnitz, Kepler, or Euler. But in the evenings, when the family gathered to read from Goethe or the Bible, he found it increasingly difficult not to snicker at his half brother’s coarseness, which Peter always passed off as misreadings: “Abraham beshat Isaac. Eh? Sorry. Abraham begat Isaac, that is. Excuse me, my parents. Stupid of me. Stupid Dutchman.”

  Together at these sessions, the two older boys delighted secretly in Hubert’s total illiteracy, the child’s complete inability and refusal to learn to read: “What use is this gibberish to me? I’m a worker, a So-veet. There are people who read and people who shoot and I’ll tell you right now that when the big change for the poor comes I’d rather have one bullet than all these words.” The same speech could have been punishable by imprisonment a few years back, before the abrogation of Bismarck’s socialist laws.

  Adolphe would step in at these outbursts, sparing his parents their show of righteous indignation. In truth, the legal father grew to enjoy Hubert’s childish outbursts in that he could then watch his first adopted son go to work with the well-loved arguments of the right. Adolphe adored arguing politics with Hubert. And when either backed themselves boyishly into a dialectical corner, they did what all good political theorists do: they made up figures. Adolphe continued to argue his father’s conservatism well past the day when it could do him any good.

  Alone, Adolphe would practice talking, something he rarely did in public since puberty. He tried for that jaunty growl of Peter’s. Soon, he began copying his new brother more brazenly. He caustically called his old friends “villagers.” In talk when the topics went beyond him, he’d wave his hand as Peter always did, saying, “X squared, y squared, z squared.”

  His father’s moral imperative, however impaired, would at least see him through the month. Alicia Heinecke, the not-quite May Queen, seeing a deadline of June 18—Adolphe’s nineteenth birthday and the start of his compulsory military privilege—set to work courting him with regional efficiency. She contrived to monopolize most of his free time during the busy spring farming months, working hard to appear demure and inaccessible for one so much around. One becalmed, prematurely hot day she had him for forty minutes. They walked together in Truller Woods in silence. Her silence, more than any other single characteristic,
always evoked Adolphe’s gratitude and thereby his love for her. Soon, however, Alicia compromised the silence with a parliamentarian’s grace.

  —Adolphe . . . I have to tell you that . . . I’m missing . . . something.

  Adolphe was at a loss as to how to parse the message, until his vanity suggested a solution.

  —Oh sparrow! You’re missing your man Adolphe because he’s in the fields so much? Is that it, little one?

  Neither winced at the nineteenth-century endearment. In lovemaking alone, Adolphe resisted the taint of Peter, who called any woman who would listen to him “my meatpie.” Adolphe referred to himself in the third person, a character actor reluctant to see himself in the romantic lead. His affectionate response increased Alicia’s nervousness.

  —No! I mean, well yes, I do miss you, my dearest. But no. I mean I’m missing something else. I’ve been missing something else.

  Adolphe tried to recall what trivial promise he’d failed to keep, what keepsake he’d braggingly promised her. He had not borrowed anything from her, to the best of his remembrance. He felt the sick suspicion that the euphemism stood for some article of clothing they had lost, left behind when collecting themselves after an innocuous fumble in the oak leaves. He pictured her mother, huge over her, demanding, “Where is your . . . ?,” and her father, larger, demanding the same of him. He could think of nothing diplomatic to say to her, nor could he fully interpret the nature of this crisis. His silence roused her from nervousness to violent resentment.

  —I’m. Missing. Blood.

  For one horrible moment he imagined that she meant for drinking. She was a vampire, pale at night, in a thin gown, red-spattered, crouched over fallen barnyard animals. She was saying that their courtship, so perfect and placid until now, overlooked only one thing—her insatiable need for his jugular.