What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  Nearby is another, less frequented bar: AYATOLLAH DRINKS BAR NO CREDIT GIVEN.

  What the eye sees, the hand reaches out for. In Ghana the largest unit of currency is worth about a dollar. To make simple payments, you have to run around with a shopping bag full of banknotes. The girl in charge of cash is dismayed by the ever-swelling numbers of open hands.

  Nana of Elmina, never at a loss for a pious homily, has this to say: ‘It’s like pig breeding. Some pigs are greedy feeders. Some are nice pigs. You never can tell.’

  The orders for the day include the following: ‘Attention – 250 Amazons arrive from Accra by night; prepare accommodation at the army barracks.’

  The Amazons (Werner called them Amazones) are nice girls from Accra with names like Eunice, Beatrice, Patience, Primrose, Maud, and Rhoda. At Elmina there were 700 of them, trained in machete drill by a lion-faced Italian stunt director, Benito Stafanelli. They behaved very badly. They outraged the villagers by singing songs of fantastic obscenity. They went on strike for more money and nearly staged a riot.

  At 8.30 in the morning their buses arrive at the palace. We hear shrieks and yells on the far side of the wall.

  ‘The situation may get out of hand,’ says Werner in a sombre voice. ‘Someone will have to pray for us.’

  The Amazons saunter across the yard and then go off to change, or rather strip, into their Amazon costume: a yellow cache-sex, breasts smeared with whiting, and for a helmet a scarlet gourd dotted with cowrie shells. They carry machetes, shields, and spears. The spears have their tips bent over, but one could still take your eye out.

  Waiting – as always happens on a film set – for something to happen, I sit with the girls and overhear snatches of conversation.

  ‘Take off your brassière, Jemimah!’

  ‘How can you take up with that coward?’

  ‘Yeah, but what can you do? He is a human being.’

  ‘He is only walking by himself. He has no wife.’

  ‘Women in Europe do not do that, Rhoda!’

  The day is unbearably hot – about 113° F, 45°C – and the Amazons are wilting fast. They have been called on to make a spectacular charge on the palace. We sit in the portico and watch the rehearsal. Suddenly the girls are hurtling toward us, spears waving, with Werner barefoot in the lead. ‘Come on, girls!’ he shouts. ‘Faster! Faster!’

  We have supper in a white-painted bungalow known as the Casino, and we are drinking our umpteenth beer of the evening when the Amazons arrive. There has been some dispute about their pay. They have already been paid more than their contract, but that does not make them happy. Egged on by Kinski – who declares, ‘I’m for the girls!’ – they surround the Casino and raise a fearful din. We draw the curtains, but the wind blows them open. Faces appear through the louvres: ‘You will die.’ ‘You think you can stuff a black woman. You’ll see.’

  Werner paces the room in a state of extreme agitation. Usually he puts all such transactions in the hands of subordinates, and now they’ve bungled it. The Portuguese doctor quite loses his head. ‘I’m an African!’ he shouts (he was born in Mozambique). ‘I know how serious this shit is.’ Then when he has calmed down a little, he adds sententiously, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans.’

  Outside, the Amazons kick and shove the building, which under their combined weight could collapse. One suspects, however, that they are not really trying. But they do burst in. Glasses fly. A girl gets kicked, and the man who did the kicking turns red and white with rage. Not so Werner, who towers above the assembly and announces, ‘My sense of justice tells me – ‘at which the kicker screams, ’You mean your sense of stupidity!’

  There is some ugly talk of bringing in the army. Instead, Werner – a monument of sanity in a cast of nervous breakdowns – slips out through a side door and confronts the girls. At the sound of his habitual cry - ‘Girls! Girls!’ - the rumpus simmers down. He and their spokeswoman, Salome, immediately reach a compromise. Laughing happily, the girls go back to their buses.

  Werner comes back in, exhausted, and says to me, ‘That was only an arabesque.’

  Next day. Sunday. A day of rest. The door of the Casino is covered with red mud footprints. Another drama is unfolding at the military barracks.

  As part of her equipment, each Amazon has been given a foam-rubber mattress, but the soldiers, having shared the mattresses all night, make off with them in the morning.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ Kinski tells Werner. ‘Do something.’

  Werner and I drive to the barracks, a collection of rickety wooden buildings, where he must again defuse the situation. Eagerly the girls cluster around him. With a hierophantic gesture, he cries, ‘Girls! Girls! I love you.’ A squeaky voice pipes back, ‘And we love you, too!’

  He apologises, sorrowfully, for the scene last night. He apologises for the stolen mattresses. ‘If I could take justice from my rib, I would give it to you.’ Alas, there is nothing to be done.

  Next, the Amazons’ bus drivers, claiming that the mattress crisis has delayed them, insist on an extra day’s pay.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ says Werner. ‘Quick!’

  Tuesday. There is one more scene to be shot in Africa, a night scene in which the future King Ghezo rescues the Brazilian from prison. I would like to stay, but the plane for London leaves Accra tonight. Besides, I am needed to relay messages to Munich on the logistics of getting the crew plus a ton of equipment from Tamala to Bogotá via Madrid.

  A few weeks later on another plane I sit next to a New York lawyer whose client, a big Hollywood name, once chickened out of one of Werner’s films.

  ‘Herzog?’ the man said. ‘Don’t go on a trip with him.’

  ‘But I have.’

  1988

  5

  RUSSIA

  GEORGE COSTAKIS: THE STORY OF AN ART COLLECTOR IN THE SOVIET UNION

  George Costakis is the leading private art collector in the Soviet Union. And his is no ordinary collection, but one of compelling interest to all who would understand the art of this century. For twenty-six years he has conducted his private archaeological excavation – and this is what it has required – to unearth the Leftist art movement which burst on Russia in the years around the Revolution. Russia’s revolution is the outstanding intellectual event of the century, and her painters, sculptors and architects rose to the occasion. During the First War the centre of artistic gravity shifted from Paris to Moscow and Leningrad where it remained for a few turbulent years.

  ‘I will make myself black trousers of the velvet of my voice,’ sang its most conspicuous spokesman, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Young women shivered with pleasure at the voice of the man who called himself ‘the cloud in pants’. Characteristically it took a Russian émigré, Serge Diaghilev, to galvanise the fading talents of Western Europe into a show of activity. But by his exile he divorced himself from the source of his inspiration. The Russian soil is a powerful mother and few of her artists survive the trauma of parting.

  Those with strong will power stayed. The uniqueness of the Russian situation encouraged in them an almost Messianic belief in the power of art to transform the world. And because the most extreme apostles of modernism had opened their arms to the Bolsheviks, they were able to press their claims. Admittedly they fought each other (with fists) and divided into schismatic groups, each broadcasting its manifestos which read like the anathemas of the medieval church. They called themselves misleading names – Constructivists, Productivists, Objectivists, Suprematists – which often reflect personal vendettas rather than any real ideological split. As a whole, however, the work of the Leftists has a freshness and confidence, which towers over the smartness, the hysteria and the aridity of much European art of the Twenties.

  When the full history of the Russian movement comes to be written – and to some extent we must thank Costakis that it can be written – it will probably emerge as the most significant of all. Whatever we think, later generations will look on the twentieth cent
ury as the century of abstract painting. Two Russians, Kasimir Malevich and Vassily Kandinsky, are its pioneers, and to understand the movement properly we must place it first in its original Slavic context.

  For a few euphoric years the avant-garde flourished, but its anarchic philosophy appeared to contradict the crucial tenets of Soviet Marxism. It attracted official disapproval; was formally sat on, and the paintings disappeared under beds or into the vaults of museums. When Costakis began, Leftist art was quite forgotten. Outside the Soviet Union it attracted a few disparaging comments. Inside it did not arouse a flicker of interest. In 1947 an art critic could denounce Cezanne’s dishonest ‘indifference to subject matter’ and complain that his fruit and flowers ‘lack aroma and texture’. In those days the non-figurative artist was a pariah.

  Costakis was the ‘mad Greek who buys hideous pictures’. He spent fifteen years in the cold and if, over the past ten, his apartment has become an object of pilgrimage, it gives him very obvious satisfaction. In his twenties Costakis bought tapestries, silver and Dutch landscape painting. ‘ . . . Kalf . . . Berchem . . . this kind of thing. Then little by little they all looked to me like one colour. I had twenty paintings on the wall and it was like one painting.’ He cannot single out any one event of childhood that inclined him towards works of art, but imagines the ceremonial of the Orthodox Church may have affected him. ‘But this is not the real reason. All my life I wanted to write a book . . . or make an aeroplane . . . or invent some industrial miracle. I had to do something. And I told myself, “If I continue to collect old paintings, I will do nothing. Even if one day I will find a Rembrandt, people will say ‘He was lucky’ and that is all.”’ Then, in the dark days after the war, someone offered him three brightly coloured paintings of the lost avant-garde. ‘They were signals to me. I did not care what it was . . . but nobody knew what anything was in those days.’

  The three paintings signalled to Costakis the existence of a world he had never suspected. Whenever free from his duties at the Canadian Embassy he hunted for ‘lost’ pictures ‘thrown around all the corners of Moscow and Leningrad’. The hunt led to old people who imagined time had passed them by. Some were broken by events and delighted to have even a token of recognition. He rescued canvases that were rolled up or covered with dust. He met Tatlin before he died, ‘the great fool’, who designed the Monument to the Third International, and lived alone with some hens and a balalaika. He befriended Stepanova, the widow of the comprehensive genius Alexander Rodchenko. He tracked down the friends of the great Malevich. He bought works by the émigrés Kandinsky and Chagall; by Lissitzky, the master typographer, and Gustav Klutsis, the Constructivist designer; by Liubov Popova, the ‘strongest painter of her generation’ (‘When she was fighting for art, she was a man; but in bed she was a woman’); and by Ivan Kliun, whose cosmic abstractions anticipate Rothko. With persistence he traced obscure artists who had signed the early manifestos, finding in them qualities their contemporaries had overlooked. And as he accumulated, he pieced together the story of their ideologies, alliances, fantastic projects, squabbles and love affairs; for revolutionary freedom was synonymous with free love.

  Costakis was never rich, but he paid every rouble he could afford, sometimes offering two or three times the price asked. (I was told this independently.) The next acquisition was always a real struggle. Some years ago he saved up the money for a car, and his wife was ecstatic about the prospect of picnics in the country. A few days later a Chagall arrived and the car returned mysteriously to the garage for repairs. He asked her, ‘Which do you prefer, the Chagall or the car?’ to which she replied, ‘I like the Chagall but . . . ’ The Chagall stayed on the wall and the car stayed in the garage.

  Costakis’s family stayed in Russia through the Revolution and Civil War. His father came from the Ionian island of Zacynthos and had tobacco interests in Southern Russia. His mother, now in her advanced nineties, lives in a dacha outside Moscow and recently discovered amid general surprise that she could speak fluent English after fifty years of not speaking it. Her son is a complex, very likable man of sixty-one, with solid black eyebrows, quizzical eyes and a diffident but disarming smile, belied in photographs. ‘Photographers make me look like a crook.’ He is resourceful, yet innocent to the point of unworldliness at the same time. In a good mood he is almost uncontrollably buoyant; when agitated he plays the guitar and sings Russian folksongs in a dark melancholy voice.

  He and his irrepressibly cheerful Russian wife live in an apartment at the top of a new white tile and concrete block on the Prospekt Vernadskogo in a far-flung extension of the city. From its windows you overlook an anonymous landscape of tall buildings, spaced far apart and exposed to the wind that whistles in from the forest. In February the snow lay thick. Only the odd tree and black fur-hatted figures, threading along thin muddy paths, punctuated the white space between the buildings.

  On his own territory Costakis becomes one of the great personalities of Moscow. He has placarded the walls with pictures, and pinned unframed canvases to doors. Vibrant colours and elemental forms of paintings dance around the walls; the exuberance of the artists themselves seems to linger in the apartment. Too often a visit to a famous art collection entails a display of sterile exhibitionism on the part of the owner; but Costakis infects all comers with his enthusiasm. Some art historians have been less generous with him. With the calculated meanness of scholars they have picked his brains and failed to acknowledge their source.

  The rooms vary between the neatness of a museum and the amiable chaos of family life. There are samovars and painted Russian peasant boxes, a collection of icons, Congo fetishes, Chinese tea-kettles and Eskimo carvings from the Siberian Arctic. Occasionally Costakis’s son comes home on leave from the Soviet Army. His daughters arrive at all hours with husbands and boyfriends expecting to be fed. It is also home for two large affectionate dogs, a Borzoi and a Kerry Blue Terrier. And as Russia’s unofficial Museum of Modern Art it attracts the expert and curious from all countries. The visitors’ book begins with an autographed line by Stravinsky and continues with a string of familiar names. The deferential comments of museum directors from East and West underline the collection’s uniqueness. A famous Soviet actor writes: ‘One of the best and most alive museums in the world. I am not drunk.’

  The existence of the Costakis collection introduces an unfamiliar aspect of life in the Soviet Union. In Western imagination the Marxist State is the declared enemy of private property; and some might suppose that a valuable private art collection merely reveals the inconsistency of Marxism. This is not so. Nothing in the Soviet legal code prevents a man owning pictures any more than it prevents him owning a pair of boots. Nor can one suggest, by way of explanation, that Costakis uses his Greek citizenship to enjoy special rights and immunities. He does not.

  There are plenty of private collections in the Soviet Union today and prices are rising. An entry in Costakis’s visitors’ book which reads, ‘An example to all of us Russian collectors of avant-garde art’, tells us he has competition. But two awkward facts remain; that abstract art was banned by 1932; that it has failed to resurface on the walls of museums. The Ministry of Culture, however, is showing signs of a more indulgent attitude. Rumours are in the air of a Soviet Museum of Modern Art. Costakis, who is tender-hearted towards the country of his adoption and will not have her slandered, sees in this a vindication of his life’s work. He cannot afford to give them outright, but one day he would like to see his pictures in that museum.

  The reasons for the ban are far from clear. Western opinions on the subject have long entertained a consoling fiction, that Party bureaucrats failed to understand Leftist art, therefore hated it and branded it as subversive. Its disappearance is used as an excuse for pious assertions on the need for artistic freedom and for exposing ‘official’ Soviet art to ridicule. These have not been helpful. I do not mean to suggest that Leftist artists were not horribly wronged in the late Thirties. But the idea that their art
was banned through ignorance is a trite explanation which belittles its significance.

  In the opinion of its makers, the Bolshevik Revolution had set man free. The proletariat had won – was, in theory, dictator, and had the right to decide what was, or was not, proletarian art. Marx had hoped that once the worker had free time he would ‘among other things, paint’. But for all his genius, he was not visually inclined and did not suggest what the worker should paint. Nor did his theory allow for the visual awareness of the Russians, nor for the Russian painter’s status as prophet and teacher. No government can afford to ignore him; and this is a fact not appreciated in the West, where a revolutionary art is defused by the patronage of the rich. One of Lenin’s secretaries records how people were led before Repin’s painting The Barge-haulers on the Volga in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and converted to revolution by its message against injustice. Now all good Bolsheviks believed that art belonged to the people. But by October 1917 there are two contradictory opinions on the form the new art should take.

  In one camp were the Futurists. (I use the word Futurist in the widest sense.) As the old order tottered, they had conducted a war of nerves against middle-class morality and taste. They saw themselves as a wrecking-party which would unhinge the future from the past. Their painters saw in French Cubism a preliminary shattering of images beloved by the bourgeois. The philosopher Berdyaev said Picasso was the last of the Stone Age Men. Their poets had an ‘insurmountable hatred for the language existing before them’. They drained poetry of its meaning and insisted on the primacy of pure sound. ‘Words are but ghosts hiding the alphabet’s strings.’ They published their manifestos – ‘Go to the Devil’ – ‘The Thunder Boiling Cup’ – ‘A Slap to Public Taste’ – on the cheapest paper, ‘the colour of a fainted louse’. Mayakovsky and David Burliuk, the self-appointed storm-troopers of Futurism, paraded around St Petersburg in alogical fancy dress; crowds wondered if they were clowns or savages or fakirs or Americans. Mayakovsky once advised his audience to ‘carry their fat carcasses home’.