Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  The buildings on the canal along Herengracht are the most ele­gant. They are the palaces of wealthy merchants from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Very nice to look at.

  Fleur and Guido said to Andreas, Go to the Tuschinski Cinema on Reguliersbreestraat, it’s near your house. Reguliersbreestraat is not a particularly wide street and armies of consumers march along it in both directions, the street is full of all kinds of shops, cramped fast-food snack bars with plastic chairs, tables and cutlery, in which the food is prepared by people from every continent, who do not raise their eyes to look at the architecture. So Andreas Ban passes along that street, Reguliersbreestraat, several times from top to bottom, finding not one exceptional building until he searches for numbers 26–28. Squeezed in the embrace of boring gray multistory blocks, the Tuschinski Cinema gleams oddly, almost comically transposed, adorned in the Art Deco style with elements of both the Amsterdam School and Jugendstil on its facade.

  Then Andreas Ban begins superficially to research the story of Tuschinski, and once again comes across a small, forgotten trace of the past planted monumentally at 26–28 Reguliersbreestraat; the life of a dreamer buried in the foundations of a building of entertainment, a building on whose walls today, from celluloid tapes (or virtually from digital cameras) stream tales that both concern us and do not.

  Abraham Icek Tuschinski (in Polish Tuszynski) was born near łódź in 1886 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. He erected his building for the citizens of Amsterdam to discover a path to illusion, to cheerful, benign lies meant to brighten their existence, but in the end he himself was unable to escape the greatest horror of the twentieth century.

  A tailor by profession, Tuszynski reaches Rotterdam from Poland in 1903, with the intention of emigrating to America. In circumstances that cannot now be explained, he does not board the intended ship and, instead of pattern-cutting and sewing, he throws himself into building vaudeville and cinema halls. As early as 1911 he opens in Rotterdam the Thalia, the Royal Cinema, the Scala and the Olympia and, in 1928, yet another luxurious hall, the finest Dutch cinema, the Tuschinski, built in 1921. After the outbreak of the Second World War, during the German bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940, Tuschinski is left without his box of dreams. The Amsterdam cinema changes its name to the Tivoli and becomes a Nazi deportation center. On July 1, 1942, Abraham Icek Tuschinski and his wife Mariem Ehrlich are taken off to the Dutch concentration camp of Westerbork, and then to Auschwitz, where soon afterward the two of them, holding hands, watched the last roll of their life’s film as showers of gas clouded their memories.

  There were several other occasions when Nazism ambushed Andreas’s Amsterdam days, but mostly he kept it at bay.

  Every Friday Spui Square is flooded with covered stalls, gazebos, displaying new and secondhand books. There are old editions, bibliophile exemplars, new editions, postcards, prints, records, children’s books from the beginning of last century, history books, intermingling languages and publishers from all over the world. Coffee is brewed, beer poured, information exchanged, a great scholarly bookish family hums and buzzes from nine in the morning until six in the evening. From his bedroom window on the gallery, in the attic, Andreas Ban follows that piling up of ideas between covers, whether it is raining, snowing, blowing a gale, the stallholders do not give up. Andreas Ban goes down to the square, looks around, happens upon a stall with English books and to his horror reaches for a copy of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man. A little red light comes on in his head, he shudders, enough, Andreas, he tells himself and for thirteen euros buys a copy of Lewis Carroll Victoriaans Fotograaf (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Landshoff, 1979), as a memento and for pleasure.

  At three points, marking the vertices of a huge imaginary triangle, Spui Square is framed by identical sculptures of the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner who lives partly in New York, partly in Amsterdam. These sculptures do not remind one of Demnig’s stumbling stones, but they are for stumbling on. They are steel structures resembling open books placed on the ground, roughly one meter by one and a half (Demnig’s blocks are small, ten centimeters square, and they are shiny). On one page of Weiner’s open book it says: Een vertailing / van de ene taal in de andere, and on the other: A Translation / from one language to another. People sit on these “books,” children climb on them, and onto them one can put purchased books and other goods. It is clear that, as an artist, Weiner does not exactly nurture a love of the visual and the sensual, he seems to recoil from the image, relying above all on the power of the word.

  Weiner probably does not write; if he did, he would have realized how impotent the word has now become, how anemic it is today, dry and useless. Nowadays, to bow down before words, when any fool scatters them around thoughtlessly as if brushing dandruff from his shoulders, is almost moronic. Besides, Weiner’s rigid, dark-steel “books” are ugly, aggressive, and as cold as the blank gaze of a damaged mind.

  The photographer Evert van Kujik tells of meeting and photographing the singer, accordion player and busker Nenad Banda. Evert van Kujik shows Andreas Ban two of his photographs of Nenad Banda on Spui Square some Friday long ago, weaving a glimmering stage full of flux for shoppers, a stage no doubt more exciting and potent than Weiner’s rigid one. The photographer Evert van Kujik tells Andreas that until the outbreak of the war, Nenad Banda taught in a secondary school in Vinkovci, that he came to Amsterdam in 1993 and had a hard life. He says of Nenad Banda that he hovered between reality and longing, like an angel, only superficially immersed in mortality. Nenad Banda died in 2006 of lung cancer, at the age of forty-three. He left a wife and a five-year-old son and emptiness, a dull silence on the squares and market places of Amsterdam.

  Photography and facial surgery are Andreas Ban’s two unrealized dreams. Psychology and writing are for him no solace, they are but the debris of the transposed world that Andreas Ban wished to make, at least for his personal enjoyment. So, in the bathroom in Rijeka, in a now rusted transoceanic trunk which absorbs clouds of damp with every shower, for three decades an old Opemus enlarger, trays, tongs, timers and unopened packets of long since unusable photographic paper have been rotting, because even if there were the possibility of Andreas Ban ever returning to his dream, hours are tolling — too late, old man.

  In Belgrade, Andreas Ban developed photographs in his kitchen, on nights when there was no moonlight, and dried them in the miniature bathroom with no window. He had saved up around two thousand dollars for an Olympus with the requisite lenses, and asked his father to help him with the customs and import. His father said, Forget that idiocy, save your eyes. That was in the mid-seventies. Today Andreas Ban’s eyes are completely shot, myopic and glaucomic. Perhaps his father had been right, perhaps Andreas Ban should have simply looked at green, not at any kind of blackness, not at any kind of darkness. And ironed out the convolutions of his brain.

  Into the gray mailbox Evert van Kujik drops for Andreas Ban a book of photographs by August Sanders (sixty portraits of Germans taken between 1913 and 1928), a gift, and two studies for him to look at, one with the powerful works of socially and politically committed (there, it’s possible) Dolf Toussaint, and the other of the softer nostalgic George Breitner (1857–1923). Toussaint’s book of photographs of Amsterdam’s working-class district Jordaan, taken in the 1960s, sells for three hundred euros or more.

  Alongside one of the central Amsterdam canals, an elegant hundred-year-old building in Keizersgracht houses the Foam photography museum. The display of photographs at that time by Alexander Rodchenko, still barely known to Western European audiences, draws observers into a time that crackles with passion, political and social upheaval, cruel prejudices, merciless killings, into a time when the world is being broken and torn apart, when rebellious and provocative art springs from the magical debris of the past. Into a time forever lost. A time whose energy spilled into the twentieth century like Niagara Falls, with a terrifying crash, to leave, now in the twenty-first, a shallow stream, a
trickle, a little stagnant water at the bottom of which roll the darkened and slimy pebbles of memory. Rodchenko’s portraits of Lilya Brik, Mayakovsky and Osip Brik, his buildings and structures taken at sharp angles, often from below, arouse both unease and longing. Their large size and bizarre details suck observers in and, traveling through the dark tunnels of a time warp, they reach open landscapes, where even the air boils. Out spring Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein (invisible in the exhibition), Boris Pasternak recites poems, Andrei Voznesensky brings him his first verses, Kazimir Malevich waves a paintbrush, Maya Plisetskaya dances, Picasso smiles, the international avant-garde marches with a firm step, there, buried in the depths of the earth.

  The first exhibition of photographs that Andreas Ban visits during his émigré escapade to Toronto is by Albert Eisenstaedt. At that time refugees from Yugoslavia, among them Leo and Andreas, spend their days in government offices that advise refugees in wealthy Canada on life in general — on nutrition, on personal hygiene, on learning the language, looking for employment (with higher or lower prequalifications), after which some travel into depression, others to “European Meats,” where meat has passed its sell-by date and is sold off cheap, while yet others sip coffee and stretch out pastry sheets.

  It is summer. In Yorkville (Toronto’s “bohemian” quarter) everything pulsates, washed and stylish. Andreas Ban knows where to find the Mira Godard Gallery and in it Motherwell, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella, Lipchitz; nearby are also the Galerie Dresdnere, Evelyn Aimis Fine Art and the Nancy Poole Studio. They display Warhol, Rauschenberg, Safdie, de Kooning. Irena Klar is in the Hollander York Gallery, while John Walsh is in Kinsman Robinson. But he goes to a button seller.

  At that time, in 1995, Eisenstaedt is ninety-seven. He does not come from New York to Toronto because it annoys him to maneuver up and down steps in his wheelchair. He prefers to look into the distance from the Time-Life skyscraper and, by then already only in his thoughts, take snaps. And remember.

  As a button seller Eisenstaedt is useless. Instead of selling buttons, he fiddles with the lens of a camera he was given as a present, so his boss fires him. He feels better. He is free. He is a free Jew in Germany. A free marksman aiming at dancers, beggars, faces, streets. He becomes a well-known and sought-after photographer. In the early 1930s he begins voyaging through the world. He records for himself, not yet knowing that he is also recording for posterity. No more buttons in his life. Yet he nurtures a strange, suppressed tenderness to that clothing detail. That tenderness is there every day as an echo, reminding him of how it all began.

  In 1930, in Berlin, he takes pictures of little girls in ballet schools, in Paris of a man with a doll in his hand near Rue St Denis, and a rehearsal of “Swan Lake” at the Opéra. In 1931, from Paris (“Destitute Men, Notre Dame Cathedral”), he goes to Volendam, Holland, where he spends time with art students (1932). He returns to Berlin to immortalize Jascha Heifetz conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, then goes to St Moritz (“Skating Waiter”). In 1933, at a first night in Milan’s La Scala he photographs ballerinas again, Milanese, coachmen and the poor, he photographs young nuns in Turin, in New York in 1934 poodles on Fifth Avenue, and in Venice, that same year, the first meeting of Hitler and Mussolini. Then, in Tannenburg, Germany, Hitler at the funeral of von Hindenburg. Associated Press sends him urgently to Geneva to catch Joseph Goebbels at the meeting of the Fifteenth League of Nations, extolling the wisdom and strength of his Führer. In the first row stand reporters, asking questions. Goebbels smiles for the cameras. Then everyone leaves. Eisenstaedt raises his camera, Goebbels fixes his gaze on him. In the focused eye of the camera and the sharp eye of Goebbels fateful decisions shimmer. In 1935, Albert Eisenstaedt abandons Germany forever. I succeeded in taking everything with me. Three years later, I would have ended up in a gas oven, he would say later.

  Through Paris, Albert Eisenstaedt reaches New York at the right time. Modeled on popular German photo-magazines, Henry Luce is preparing to launch what has become the legendary Life magazine.

  Eisenstaedt becomes one of the first four “house” photographers.

  With more than 2,500 photo-essays and ninety-two covers of the leading American magazine in his portfolio, Eisenstaedt remains to this day the father of photojournalism.

  The Circle Gallery is also in Yorkville. As its name suggests, it is a round gallery. In it, one looks around and circles. Spectators circle around the universe of Albert Eisenstaedt and no longer know whether the whole of the twentieth century is revolving around them or whether they are traveling along some imagined orbit through history captured at the moment of its creation by the click of the button of a gifted button seller.

  Eisenstaedt has never visited Toronto. The Circle Gallery has no ramp for his wheelchair. So he misses the last exhibition of his life. He dies on August 24, 1995, a little more than a month after its closure.

  In the same Amsterdam street, Keizersgracht, some two hundred numbers further down from the Foam museum, there is another small private photography museum, Huis Marseille. This Marseille House, built in 1665, belonged to a wealthy French merchant whose ships sailed from Marseille to Amsterdam and back. It is a cold, windy day, it is raining and getting dark. After Rodchenko, Leo and Andreas hurry down Keizergracht, while Canada runs after them. In the Huis Marseille on the three floors of that narrow building are displayed works by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. These are color photographs in which there is almost no color, no blue sky or lush vegetation, photographs of enormous dimensions, two meters square, maybe more, and on them Burtynsky “talks” about the phases of oil exploitation and about the impact of that exploitation on landscape and on people, although people seem to have been brushed out of his photographs. If they are in some, they are reduced to the point of invisibility, they have to be looked for. These reduced people, even when they exist in Burtynsky’s photographs, are hardly noticeable because they are dark and greasy, completely merged into the devastated landscapes covered in smudges, streams and lakes of thick black gold. As a partially reassuring contrast to Burtynsky’s photographs, on every floor of the Huis Marseille there is a view (beyond closed windows and balconies) onto an inner garden with a summer house and orderly horticultural fantasies, in spring and summer probably awash with lively colors and shades of green, but now, in February, only dead leaves dance on the central plateau and the shiny bare branches of tall trees knock against the windowpanes like silent goblins.

  At the time of Andreas and Leo’s Canadian emigration, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged in Nigeria. Ken Saro Wiwa was a fighter for human rights, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, a poet. As a result of a trumped-up accusation by the then military regime with the ruthless General Sani Abacha at its head, he was tried at a military court. The international community protested, but Ken Saro Wiwa and eight of his fellow fighters were nevertheless hanged because the military regime in Nigeria did not care about protests from the international community, because the military regime in Nigeria needed dollars from oil exploitation, because the Shell Company (officially named Royal Dutch Shell, originally a Dutch and British firm with its head office to this day in The Hague) has its biggest wells in Nigeria and because Shell is today a multinational company in which the USA also has its fingers.

  The land in the valley of the Niger River is devastated. This is the valley inhabited by the Ogoni people, from whom the family of Ken Saro Wiwa spring. In 1995, the land of the Niger River Valley was a military zone. Andreas Ban does not know whose zone it is today, but the land is polluted, nothing grows there any longer. On that land the children are hungry and the water is poisoned. There is nothing there for fishermen or farmers. The Ogoni people get no compensation for their lost lives, their lost land, their lost waters which once, long ago, served half the state of Nigeria. The military regime of General Abacha killed people in the Niger Delta. The Niger Delta is the most densely populated area of Africa, with almost six hundred inhabita
nts per square kilometer.

  There are oil pipelines everywhere. Because of aging installations, in some places the oil leaks into the earth. Nothing will grow there for the next thousand years. The earth is hard, baked, dead; it is possible that there are still little islands of fertile soil five meters beneath the black petrified crust.

  The military regime in Nigeria hangs Ken Saro Wiwa for accusing the Shell Company of genocide. The Shell Company does not wish to make a statement. The Shell Company has no intention of halting oil extraction in Nigeria. Particularly if Ken Saro Wiwa is out of the way.

  Many people are killed. Many homes burned. They rebelled. They will not rebel any more. The military regime in Nigeria was quiet for a few more years. And Shell is still tranquil.

  So, some threads delicately entwine over there in Holland, unexpectedly. The unruly Rodchenko and his powerful vivid formats vanish beneath the burned inhuman slabs of Burtynsky, as though they had been covered over by a vast cement block and sunk into non-existence. Then Canada, buzzing in Andreas’s head, drawing him into a space and time from which he believed he was amnestied. And Shell there in The Hague, the site of the International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes committed on the territory of former Yugoslavia, where translators from the former shared territory do their work, translators whom Andreas Ban knows from a former life, some even come to the launch of the Dutch edition of his book in the splendid Selexyz bookshop in the famous Hague Passage. Run, Andreas, run, he told himself, in vain.

  In Amsterdam, Andreas Ban watches gay men dancing in the street, holding hands, walking with their arms around each other, unafraid.