19.
I imagined the man lost at sea, the face I’d seen in videos and performances now heavily bearded, eyes intoxicated by the light of the stars. Around me, as chip packets rustled and their chips were being crunched, I imagined the storms he would have faced, the tiny sails of his boat sinking under giant waves, his face lashed by sideways rain. I considered the fear and hopelessness of such a fate but also the magic of being swallowed whole like this – dying without the distraction of words, catheters and systems.
The reading group of six or seven young artists and art students were discussing the performance and video artist called Bas Jan Ader who in 1975, two years before I was born, set out alone, in a thirteen-foot sail boat, to cross the Atlantic Ocean. It was the second part of a triptych of performances called In Search of the Miraculous, a work that saw him disappear and presumably die at sea.
He was ‘a small baby at the breast of eternity’, a woman read out, quoting the artist’s poet mother, who had a premonition of her son’s death a few days after his departure. There was a faint tone of sarcasm in her voice, an air of seriousness in the room as the group sometimes nervously, at other times robustly, discussed the artist’s work. Not being a member of the group, nor having read the book they were discussing, made me a fly on the wall, my eyes following the thread of the discussion, my ears sensitive to the sounds of the chips being passed around.
It reminded me of the only other common interest group I had attended, a film society which was made up of mostly very old men who could be seen in the front rows of the small screening room falling asleep and sliding down their chairs before the lights came on, when they would vigorously discuss the film they had no doubt watched many times before.
Between films, or midway through a very long film, the group would convene in an adjoining room where there was an urn of coffee and a table of chips and biscuits. I watched, during one such break, as a man well into his eighties, who appeared to be the leader of the group and always slept in the front row before waking up and being the most alert and informed during discussions, turned away from the two people he had been talking with. He went to the table and picked up a shortbread cream biscuit I knew well from my childhood. With his back to the room the man prised the two rectangular sides apart, closed his eyes and licked out the filling.
20.
Reclining in its custom-built vitrine, the armless figure had expressed unbearable pain and acute modesty. The awkward tilt of its head, the twisting and folding of its loin and carved cloth, those skewered feet – all of this had been too much for the camera, which had refused to focus on either the sculpture or the dusty glass, vacillating between them and everything else in the museum.
They were no bigger than the hands that made them, these wooden sculptures that decorated people’s homes and small churches during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I found them in a spa town in the Carpathian Mountains, in a museum too starved of funds to be staffed, in a pair of rooms with mould creeping up their walls, on plinths and vitrines crammed in alongside fire extinguishers and pot plants. Having always seen Christ looming and shining from above, in cathedrals and art museums, I’d found it both strange and moving to see him so fragile and battered – so close to the ground.
I had returned to the video footage between visits to the hospital, the contorting body of Christ overlaid by that of my dying father: that body whose yellowing sheen reminded me of cashew nuts, in whose curl I saw a grown foetus preparing for the womb.
Somewhere in the discomfort was a kind of magic – an awareness so acute it seemed to eclipse the life being concluded. While much of this was caused by the drugs it had seemed plausible, at the time, that life’s magic, its unstoppable wholeness, might only be glimpsed from a state of utter debasement and suffering, each second in that climax marking some kind of revelation.
I remember the way my father’s forefinger and thumb would rub the bedsheets, the way he would stare down at them like somebody inspecting soil. It was as if he was experiencing touch for the first time, and maybe he was. As I sat beside his bed one morning he squinted and smiled at the peeling window tint, a perfect spring day peeping through its holes and tears, eventually turning to me and whispering: ‘It’s snowing.’
21.
The barbecue was the only thing to consider; it was big and the thought of carrying it through the maze of corridors, stairs and doors I’d just been led through had me fearing for my back. Everything else looked fine. Besides a dozen boxes, an ironing board and some small pieces of furniture, the room in which my brother had spent his evenings for the past nine years was empty. We’d hired the van in Sydney and driven down to Canberra together; if everything went to plan we’d be back on the road in an hour or two, and deliver the goods to the apartment my brother had leased, then dropping off the van and going out for a late dinner.
I walked out onto the balcony to see if the barbecue could be taken apart. The apartment was on the ground floor, looking over a hedge and park where on my last visit, a couple of years earlier, a group of people had sat drinking all night and got very rowdy. The only person around that afternoon was a man in a grey parka walking a small dog; he was holding a black plastic bag, looking cold and impatient while his companion found the right place to go to the toilet. It was windy and fitful, an unpleasant sort of day.
I was on my knees inspecting the barbecue’s stand when I noticed the boomerang. It was perched against the outside of the balcony railing, its painted side facing the park. Two things entered my head at that moment: the boomerang had gone astray, rather than returning to its thrower, and yet the way it was placed there was clearly deliberate, as if it was intended as a message of some kind.
After working out how to remove the stand from the barbecue I went inside. My brother was crouched on the ground; he’d been packing a final box with cutlery, his tape dispenser making the familiar screeching sound.
‘What’s that boomerang doing on your balcony?’ I asked.
My brother shrugged off the question, his attention focused on holding two sides of the lid together while the packing tape sealed the box shut.
22.
Having arrived ten minutes early, I took a seat on the low wall, its row of mailboxes spewing out unwanted flyers. I sipped my takeaway coffee and looked at a cat. It was resting on its haunches beside a bowl of water and a green dish, staring at me with a thoughtful, almost beseeching expression. I whistled, puss-puss-pussed and made clicking sounds with my tongue, but it didn’t move, its body and gaze as focused as a sphinx’s.
I looked up at the apartment block I would soon be entering, its upper floors set ablaze with early morning sunshine. Every apartment was the same from the outside.
When my friend opened the door to the apartment of his sister-in-law, a woman who had recently been admitted to hospital with heart problems following years of depression, severe obesity and hoarding, I put my arm over my nose, wove my way through the living room, slid open the glass door and stepped onto the balcony. From outside I surveyed the apartment. The floor was knee high in boxes and rubbish, a layer of rat-shredded newspapers spreading across everything like confetti. On the few visible sections of carpet were large stains and white powder – what looked like some kind of poison or cleaning agent. It was hard to believe that twenty-seven tonnes of rubbish had already been removed.
On the walls there were hundreds of shiny pellets – cockroach eggs – large mould-coloured smudges, a meat pie with a beer coaster pressed into it and brown finger marks made with what might have been human faeces. There was also a photo of the cat I’d seen outside, attached to a calendar with a paper-clip. The cat was sitting on its haunches near the same bowl of water and dish, staring at the camera in exactly the way it had stared at me.
My friend came out onto the balcony with a box containing rubber gloves and fume masks. I expressed my shock at what I was seeing before putting on a mask and following him inside. As we cleaned and filled
rubbish bags, I considered the large smudges on the walls. The position of each of them told a story of how the woman now in hospital had existed here – how she had moved between these rooms as the junk took over her life. Below one of the marks, and beside the pie, for example, was an outline of her now absent bed frame. In my mind I saw her slouched in her bed, semi-paralysed, with her shoulders against the wall, oils seeping from her skin into the paintwork.
A similar mark in the living room, below the calendar with the photo, had me imagining her shoulders – right shoulder going one way, left shoulder coming back – as she was squeezed towards the edge of the room by the junk. I took a closer look at the calendar – it was eighteen months out of date.
From the physical evidence and the scenes it led me to visualise, I concluded that the cat didn’t live in the apartment but clearly had a relationship with the woman now in hospital. The cat had been affected by the sudden absence of its friend. It had been asking me to feed it.
23.
My brother-in-law greeted us at the door, explaining that his fiancé was stuck in traffic. They had moved into the apartment, still sparsely furnished, a couple of weeks back.
While Lenka was shown around, brother and sister discussing ways to make the apartment more cosy, I stood on the balcony, watching as the sun dropped behind a huddle of buildings in the distance; I looked down at the common space between the three identical blocks, a kidney-shaped swimming pool and small playground at its centre.
In a grassy area near the driveway I spotted a black cat; it was sitting on its haunches with its yellow eyes pinned on me. If it wasn’t for those unblinking eyes it would have been difficult to see, the outdoor lights being unprepared for the sudden darkness of early autumn.
A few minutes later my brother-in-law returned with a plate of meat covered with cling wrap and some bottles of beer. The excitement of beginning a new life with a person whose temperament and interests were so clearly aligned with his showed itself in every part of his body and face. We twisted the lids off and clinked our bottles.
He lifted up the cling wrap on the meat, but immediately closed it again, clicking his fingers as if remembering something he’d forgotten, and returned inside. He forgot it again, though – through the kitchen window I could soon hear him talking to Lenka about getting some pictures up on his walls but not being sure if the landlord would allow him to drill holes. I heard her describe the hanging device we use: a plastic hook attached to an adhesive strip that could be peeled off without damaging the wall.
The cat was almost indiscernible now; I emptied my beer in one large swig, rested the bottle on the ledge, pulled out my phone and took a photo. The image was too dark, the cat lost. I turned on the flash and tried to take another photo, watching this time as the flash lit up the cat’s yellow eyes. It hadn’t worked either: the image was grey and fuzzy. After the camera flashed a second time, again failing to capture anything, I was surprised to see the cat still sitting there.
24.
The only place open at that early hour was a bar with a coffee machine. Its varnished timber walls and maritime pictures gave me the feeling of being inside a boat. There was a tired-looking woman behind the bar and one other customer, a man in a black duffle coat, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. A love song from the 1930s was quietly playing in the background.
I recalled the man I’d seen yesterday on the plane: that scruffy blond hair, those lively pink cheeks, the word LOVE haphazardly tattooed across the fingers of his left hand. He was a couple of seats away, but his presence had kept me on edge until a couple of hours into the flight when I tuned in to the conversation he was having with a woman sitting between us.
In a thick accent that I took to be Dutch he had told the softly spoken woman, also in her fifties, the story of his recent life. She had listened happily, her presence seeming to settle his wayward energy. Perhaps she was a counsellor or school teacher. He told her about being diagnosed with terminal cancer, being kicked out by his wife and being denied contact with his children. When I finally caught a glimpse of his right hand I was relieved by the absence of HATE on its fingers.
Maybe it was the old love songs that had me thinking of him. I was horribly jetlagged but my mind felt productive in its scrambling. By the time I was on my second cup of coffee I was looking through my phone where I found a photo of the piece of toast, with a hole in its middle, that I’d eaten on the morning of my departure. A triangle of emotions or sensations was forming between the man on the plane, the music and the piece of toast.
After leaving the bar I walked along the canal in the direction of the hotel where I’d earlier stored my bags. I’d never been to Amsterdam and didn’t know it was entirely built around canals. The ground was covered in ice, which became trickier to negotiate when crossing over the curving pavement of a bridge. It was at the top of the bridge’s arc, while gripping the ledge and looking down into the murky water, that the connection between the man, the toast and the song became clear.
I firstly thought of the expression – which perhaps didn’t even exist or was a merging of two expressions – about dying with ‘a hole in the heart’. This led me to a quote from the book I had been reading about Anton Chekhov, the dying author having told his doctor: ‘You don’t put ice on an empty heart.’ This made the triangle of impressions a square.
Then, while staring into the canal and remembering how I had felt in the weeks leading up to making this sudden trip, I saw that it was a pentagon, or simple house shape, with me at the apex. Like the toast facing me from the plate and phone, the man on the plane, the melancholy singer, the dying writer, my heart was empty or had a hole in it.
25.
From the moment I entered the house where Rembrandt had once lived, I regretted my decision to buy the ticket. It was a stuffy and annoying experience totally at odds with the blazing, viscous beauty of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. I’m hungry and Rembrandt is dead, I thought, quickly moving through the first few rooms.
On the upper floor I arrived at the studio. A small crowd was huddled around a woman demonstrating the way the painter had prepared his materials. The woman was about forty; she had pale skin and was wearing a dark purple eye shadow that became prominent each time she glanced down at the surface her hands were working on. She seemed nervous, her eyes and hands panicky as she spoke to the audience. The longer I stood watching those flickering eyelids and thin white wrists turning the paint over with the palette knife, the more familiar the woman became.
At one point our eyes made contact – nothing registered at her end. I was pretty sure we hadn’t met but I needed to know who she reminded me of; in my mind I was grabbing people as if for a police line-up, seeing their faces appear – no, not her, no, next. By the time I left the room, about ten minutes later, the only possible lead I had was a Hollywood actor.
The following day I stood in front of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in the state museum. There was absolute conviction in the painting and yet it told of a wariness or doubt towards the life it was reflecting. Looking at the thickly applied paint on the painter’s forehead, the way it made his highlighted corrugations of skin come forward and feel so close, I remembered the woman from the day before. Suddenly my mind was switching between Rembrandt’s head and the delicate features of the woman demonstrating his paint. I was still sure I knew her – she had a face as familiar as the one before me.
26.
The only difference about the tablecloth and table I’d painted so many times was the presence of dried figs on the top level of the porcelain three-tiered platter at its centre. On the bottom two plates were the Christmas biscuits Lenka’s grandmother makes each year; there were biscuits with jam, their red insides showing around edges or through cut-out hearts, others filled with nuts and sprinkled with icing sugar.
The figs were the round ones that looked like tiny beanbags or parcels tied at their stems, a delicacy I knew well from Sydney, where they were bought cheaply
, usually in wheels of twenty or so from green grocers. They could be addictive, particularly when eaten at the studio: no sooner had the hard knot of stem from one fig been spat out than the hand would be reaching for the next. The squeaky sound they made when being chewed, the piercing of so many tiny seeds, would echo in one’s ears.
The way the sturdy skin encased the squishy insides made them particularly nice things to hold and knead, I considered while sitting at Lenka’s cousin’s table, where various members of the family had come to see me. I’d eaten a number of the figs that night, mainly to avoid the biscuits but also out of the nervousness I was feeling about being in the village on my own for the first time.
The figs gave me something to focus on, something to be seen to be enjoying, while the conversation carried on and I got drunk on the unlikeliness of the situation I’d found myself in – sitting around a family table in a village in eastern Slovakia, adults downing shots of alcohol while their children darted in and out of a television room to grab handfuls of pretzel sticks.
It was a warmth and liveliness which offset the reason for my coming to the village: to see Lenka’s grandfather one last time. The experience of sitting beside his bed, witnessing that familiar cheekiness shooting and fizzling through the darkness in his eyes, had been sad but somehow reassuring amid all the sprouting life.
On my last night, before I left on the overnight train, Lenka called and we chatted at length. I told her about her cousin’s new baby, her fourth boy – about the warmth I’d felt and been filled with during my visits to their house. When I told Lenka about the figs, which nobody else seemed to like very much, she laughed: ‘Nobody eats them because they’re really special over there – they’re more like decorations.’
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