by John Berger
I first met Rostia in the early eighties when he was selling crêpes at night on the Blvd. St Michel. He spoke French with an accent like the River Danube. And he looked like a man who had just come out of a conscript army in which he had served quite a while. Glad to be free. Single. Not an officer, not even a corporal. A bit lost in civilian life. In fact he was never in the Czech or any other army. But the long struggle of growing up, surviving, refusing, emigration, had been for Rostia like being in the army. Manoeuvre after manoeuvre. And during that time all he had dreamt was to be on leave – which meant painting furiously on whatever he could lay his hands.
His pictures were rubbishy, a bit subversive and memorable because of their awkwardness. Rubbishy in that they were badly presented and painted with whatever was at hand. Subversive in that, as you went on looking at their abstract confetti of colours, you suddenly spotted a dog or a grinning kid hidden within them. And awkward in that they assumed no manners that they didn’t have. They were just themselves, like the handle of a hammer painted red so it doesn’t get lost.
I liked their hooligan company and his. We used to drink beer together, pushing our caps to the back of our heads and sticking out our legs as if wearing dungarees. When we could find the right words in translation we told one another jokes.
In those days, women didn’t treat Rostia as well as he deserved. They pictured him as a kind of bear on a circus poster. And he didn’t make things better because, like many men who spend years in the army, he tended to be a bit paranoic. Sometimes it was difficult to guess what he was going on about.
Drinking our beer together we never once mentioned Hegel or Lukacs or Paul Klee or Dvořák. We took a lot for granted and I knew that, if we should get into a fight in one of the bars, I could count on him. His bear size and his uncannily observant eye would help.
Once, walking back over the bridges, each with an arm round the other’s shoulder, we reminisced about the wooden doorways of Prague, with doors as large as lorries. And for a moment the Seine became the Vltava for us both.
When I arrived at the studio in Chatenay Malabry, Rostia’s daughter, Andrea, was in her cot about to go to sleep. She’s almost two. Rostia no longer sells crêpes but works part-time drawing plans in an architect’s office. He and Laurence sleep on the loggia overlooking the studio space, and we ate at the table beside their bed.
He wanted me to look at his recent paintings. He went down to the studio floor and stapled the unstretched canvases, one after another, on to the wall. When there was a large one, Laurence helped him, and as I watched from above, I saw her, small, nimble, balancing like a trick cyclist beside the circus bear.
The pictures were no longer hooligan. They were still awkward, but they were absolutely sure of themselves. The subject was always the same. Metal lampshades hanging on their flexes with electric light bulbs. But on each canvas the arena of their light was a different but vast landscape. A landscape where? Not mid-European, not French, not Celtic. Just a stretch of land somewhere on the surface of the earth, lit by two, three, or four bulbs, illuminating together like a family. The more I looked, the more surely I knew they were remarkable, and the more pensive I became. Sometimes I read in a newspaper that I am (or was) one of the most influential writers about art in the English language. Yet I know nobody in the art trade in Paris or anywhere else. Nobody.
Neither I nor Rostia would get past any art expert’s first secretary. And, if by any chance we did, if we actually met a dealer, he’d look at us as if we were out of some village circus. I knew the canvases I was looking at deserved to be framed, exhibited, sold, hung in houses. And yet there was nothing I could do about it.
Rostia interrupted my thoughts: What’s up? You don’t like the dark one?
Let’s drink to Andrea! I said, but I couldn’t get rid of a nagging frustration. I wanted to see those furiously painted canvases out in the world, relying on their own authority.
We started talking about mixing colours – Rostia uses both oil and tempera – and how much cheaper it is than buying tubes. He held up a tin of cadmium yellow. Then he opened a bottle of linseed oil and he handed it to me as if he expected me to take a swig. Did he know what the effect would be?
I sniffed it and I forgot my frustrations. I was twelve years old again. I was with my first box of oil paints and my first palette the size of a school exercise book. I was handling the tubes with their exotic, distant names. Indian Red. Naples Yellow. Burnt Umber. Raw Sienna. And the mysteriously named Flake White – suggesting snowflakes in a blizzard.
The smell of that oil (the same oil with which one softens putty when putting in a window pane) took me back half a century to a promise. The promise of painting and painting, the promise of doing it every day of your life, and thinking about nothing else until you are dead!
[20]
A Girl Like Antigone
It measures, I guess, 80 cm x 200 cm. More or less the size of what you sleep on if you take a railway couchette. Not made of oak, but probably of pearwood which has a warmer colour. On it is a table lamp, also in wood, of a vaguely Bauhaus design, perhaps dating from the twenties, when the family first moved into the apartment. A modest, functional lamp looking almost hand-made, but insistent in its promise of modernity, a promise which she never for a moment believed in.
The table is in the room where she worked and slept when she was at home. In her vagrant life she must have spent more time reading and writing at this table than at any other.
I’ve never met anybody who knew her. I’ve looked at many photographs. I drew a portrait of her from a photograph. Perhaps this is why I have the strange impression that a long time ago I set eyes on her. I can recall the mixed feelings she inspired in me: a physical antipathy, a sense of my own inadequacy, a certain exhilaration at the opportunity she appeared to offer of loving. A love, as in Plato’s Timée, whose mother is Poverty. She was disconcerting, no question.
I saw the table in Paris last week. Behind it are some bookshelves and on them some of the books she read. The room is long and narrow like the table. When she sat behind it, the door was on her left. The door gives on to a corridor: opposite was her father’s consulting room. When she walked down the corridor towards the front door she would have passed the waiting room on her left. The sick, or those who feared they were sick, were immediately outside her door. She could have heard her father saying goodbye to each patient and then greeting the next one:
Bonjour Madame, sit down and tell me how you are.
On the right of her table is the window. A large one facing north. The apartment is on the sixth floor and the Rue Auguste Comte is on a slight hill, so there is a view over Paris, from the Luxembourg Gardens, just below, to beyond the Sacré Coeur. You stand at the window, you open it, you lean against the railing of the balcony on which no more than four pigeons could land, and you fly in imagination over the roofs and history. It’s the exact height for flights of the imagination: the height of birds flying to the far edge of the city, to the walls, where the present ends and another epoch begins. In no other city in the world are such flights so elegant. She loved the view from the window, and she was deeply suspicious of its privilege.
‘There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.’
She began writing on the table when she was at the Lycée Henri IV, preparing to enter the École normale. She had by then already begun the third notebook of the journal she was going to keep all her life.
She died in August 1943 in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent. The coroner’s report gave the cause of death as ‘cardial failure due to myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis’. She was thirty-four years old. The verdict was suicide, because she stopped eating.
What is special about her handwriting? It is patient, conscientious – like a student’s – but each letter – whether Roman or Greek �
�� has been formed (almost drawn) like an Egyptian hieroglyph, so much did she want each letter of each word to have a body.
She travelled to many places and she wrote wherever she was lodged, yet everything she wrote might have been written here. Whenever she had a pen in her hand, she returned in her mind to this table in order to begin thinking. Then she forgot the table.
If you ask me how I know this, I have no answer.
I sat at the table and read a poem which had marked a turning point in her life. In her hieroglyphic handwriting she had copied out the poem in English and learnt it by heart. At moments when she was overcome by despair or the pain of a migraine behind her eyes, she used to recite it out loud, like a prayer.
On one such occasion, whilst reading it, she felt the physical presence of Christ and was astonished. Visions, like the miracles of the New Testament, put her off; she found them too easy. ‘… in this sudden hold that Christ had on me, neither my imagination nor my senses played any part; I simply felt, across the pain, the presence of love, similar to that which one can read in a smile on a loved face.’
Fifty years later, as I read the sonnet by George Herbert, the poem became a place, a dwelling. There was nobody in it. Inside it was shaped like a stone beehive. There are tombs and shelters like this in the Sahara. I have read many poems in my life but I had never before visited one. The words were the stones of a habitation which surrounded me.
In the street below, above the entrance to the apartment block (today you need to tap a code to get in), there is a plaque which reads: ‘Simone Weil, philosopher, lived here between 1926 and 1942.’
[21]
A Friend Talking (for Guzine)
Sometimes it seems that, like an ancient Greek, I write mostly about the dead and death. If this is so, I can only add that it is done with a sense of urgency which belongs uniquely to life.
Abidine Dino lived with his beloved Guzine on the ninth floor of an HLM in one of those artists’ studios built, at a certain period, by the city of Paris for painters. They were happy there, but if you added all the space of the studio and its closets together, it would come to no more than the space available for the passengers in a long-distance bus. Translations, poems, letters, sculptures, drawings, mathematical models, raki, almonds covered with cocoa, cassettes of Guzine’s radio programmes in Turkish, elegant clothes (both of them in their different ways dressed as impeccable stylists), newspapers, pebbles, canvases, water-colours, photos – everything was packed in. And whenever I visited, I came away with my head full of the space of vast landscapes, even of Greater Anatolia – in such a way did Abidine and Guzine drive the coach in which they lived.
This week Abidine Dino died in the Paris hospital of Villejuif. He died three days after he lost his voice and could speak no more.
A week ago almost the last thing Abidine told me was: Don’t exaggerate in your new book. You don’t need extravagance. Stay realist. He was a realist about his cancer. He knew how grave it was. But the adjective he used about his state of health was the adjective you might use about a shoe that pinched and which you had to walk a long way in.
Any image which comes to me about him when alive inevitably includes roads, caravanserai, voyages. He had a traveller’s vigilance. As Saadi the Persian wrote:
He who sleeps on the Road will lose either his hat or his head.
In the small book-alcove of the studio, or before the portable easel which he folded up at night, Abidine continually travelled. He painted women who became planets. He drew the pain of hospital patients as with the recording needle of a seismograph. Not long ago he gave me photocopies of some drawings he had made about the tortured. (Like many of his friends he had been in prison in Turkey.) Look at them, he said, as he accompanied me to the lift on the ninth floor, and one day some words from far away may come to you. Perhaps just one word or two. That will be enough. He painted flowers – their throats, their Bosporus passages to love. This summer, at the age of eighty, whilst staying in a yali, a house on the real Bosporus, he painted a white door with a mysterious sign on it. A white door which was not in the yali but elsewhere.
On the night of his death, I woke up in the small hours of the morning. I woke up to the knowledge that he had died, and I prayed for him. I tried to become a lens in a kind of telescope so that an angel somewhere might see Abidine a little better as he accompanied him. Maybe not better. Simply a little more. Then I found myself face to face with a sheet of white paper, so full of light there was no place there for any orphaned colour.
Later I fell asleep, in no way anguished. Early next morning Selcuk, our mutual friend, telephoned to tell me we had lost Abidine. (He had died in the hospital about two hours before I woke up.)
This time I wept, choking with the grief of a dog. Grief is animal. The ancient Greeks knew that.
Men often say, referring to a noble man’s death, that a light has gone out. It is a cliché, yet how better to describe the dusk afterwards? The white paper I saw became charcoal – black, and charcoal is the colour of absence.
Absence? The sign Abidine painted on the white door this summer reminded me of another series of drawings and paintings he made during the last months. They were of crowds. Images of countless faces, each person distinct, but together in their energy similar to molecules. The images, however, were neither sinister nor symbolic. When he first showed them to me I thought this multitude of faces were like the letters of an undeciphered writing. They were mysteriously fluent and beautiful. Now I ask myself whether Abidine had not travelled again, whether these were not already pictures of the dead?
And at this moment he answers the questions, for suddenly I remember him quoting Ibn al Arabi: ‘I see and note the faces of all who have lived and will one day live, from Adam until the end of time …’
[22]
Two Men Beside a Cow’s Head
On New Year’s Day Louis had called me to help him with Blanquette who was calving. He had been into the stable twenty times since morning to feel with his fist if the end of Blanquette’s tail was soft and not rigid. Their tails go soft just before birth. Outside everything was white and in the branches of the pear trees there were parcels of snow as large as sacks. Blanquette’s waters had broken but only one hind foot had emerged.
Louis put his arm in to search for the second leg; he found it bent double but it was so slippery inside he couldn’t turn it. Nom de Dieu! he said.
I had taken a stick and was pressing it with all my weight against Blanquette’s spine, near the shoulders. The pressure makes the basin untighten. Meanwhile Louis, his arm up to his armpit inside her, tried again to turn the calf’s leg. Turned it! he hissed.
Then he had slipped a rope over one of the feet. Slowly, as we hauled, the legs came out. They were white, smeared with brownish pink, the smears being partly the colour of the hair, and partly the colour of blood, the sweet blood of that hard passage we all forget.
The calf slipped through our arms on to the straw. Its eyes were shut. Louis threw a bucket of cold water over its face. It sighed once. A single breath. It was a male. His white tongue lolled out of the corner of his mouth. Louis held the mouth open and I breathed into the throat. He massaged the heart. We poured gnole on to the tongue. Took too long! said Louis.
Louis calculated that beneath the linden tree the earth wouldn’t be frozen very hard, for the slope faces south. He tramped through the snow with a pick and shovel. I dragged the calf over the ground with the rope still attached to his leg. He slipped into the pit, his inert body naturally folding itself to take up as little space as it had inside Blanquette. The calf’s muzzle was pointing to the sky.
Louis had bent down, saying: Never knew what life was! Then he had turned the calf’s head on to its side, so that, when he threw in the first spadeful of earth, it would not hit the muzzle.
The calf who died on New Year’s Day was a bad omen we hadn’t quite forgotten.
Now the Duchess had colic. She had probably eaten some b
ad grass. She was lying down, she was refusing to eat, she didn’t move her jaws. With their four stomachs cows are fragile. Digestion is their Achilles’ heel – if anything about this docile, nimble animal-species can be compared with Achilles!
Louis felt the temperature of the Duchess’s ears, looked at her eyes, clasped her tail. The veterinary surgeon is expensive. We decided to administer the family medicine for a cow with colic.
He went to fetch some gnole and I meanwhile ground some coffee beans. Then I found an old plastic vinegar bottle, washed it out, poured into it two cupfuls of gnole and topped it up with strong fresh black coffee. I tasted the mixture to make sure it wasn’t too hot. A feeling of urgency prevented us from patiently waiting for the coffee to cool.
We returned to the stable with the bottle and Louis shortened the rope by which Duchess was attached to a ring in the wall, and he put her huge head under his arm. With his other hand he tried to force her mouth open. When cows are confused, they play stupid. The Duchess wouldn’t open. Louis pressed with his fingers against her pale-pink gums, he tugged at her immense lip. Finally she opened. I poured from the vinegar bottle into her gullet. She swallowed the coffee and gnole. Then, with her uncarnivorous teeth, she shut up like a small whale – but delicately, crushing no finger.
All we can do now is wait till tomorrow, Louis said.
[23]
A Man Baring His Chest