“I hope it’s funny,” she said. “If it’s funny, it will be all right. I’ve had enough tragedy.”
Then mercifully the lights began to go down.
“Isn’t it in color?” said Lydia as the film began. Shushing sounds came from nearby, but Lydia was right, the film was in black and white, and Sasha was disappointed.
The audience soon discovered that To the Left was not silent. In fact, as the titles appeared in white against black, faint animal noises and the chattering of birds emerged from the speakers.
Then the film began in earnest, and Tkach could see vertical bars on the screen. A prison, he thought, a political prison, but what was that moving black hulk in the corner of the cell? Before he could make it out, the camera began to move, at first to the left, just far enough to put the black hulk off the screen. The chattering sound continued, and as the camera began to move faster, the sound grew louder.
The audience sat in rapt attention for almost ten minutes. Experimental beginning, Sasha thought. And then, in the twelfth minute, he began to lose faith. Luckily, Lydia had remained quiet. Sasha and Maya both glanced at her fearfully from time to time, but her eyes remained riveted to the screen.
A quarter of an hour into the film Lydia said in her loud voice, “Monkey. That’s a monkey in the corner.”
People called out for her to be quiet, but one man said, “She’s right. It is monkeys.”
The audience fell silent once more, and the camera increased its spin to the left. Those who were fleet of eye could see the lumbering figure move forward.
“A gorilla,” said Lydia Tkach with satisfaction, for while her hearing was failing, her eyesight rivaled that of an Olympic marksman.
“Gorilla…gorilla,” came the echo of agreeing voices in the theater.
Forty minutes into the film, however, people were extremely restless.
“What is this?” came a voice from back in the theater.
“A gorilla,” said Lydia Tkach smugly.
The gorilla cries on the sound track had risen in volume, and one hour into the film, the majority of the audience was in open revolt.
“Is this a joke?” someone shouted.
“Shut up,” came a young woman’s voice.
In front of the theater, Willery stood looking back at his tormentors and defenders, a frail dark outline. Tkach could make out his flickering form. Very few in the audience knew who he was. If he keeps quiet, Tkach thought, he may escape without bodily injury.
People began to leave, the better-dressed patrons first. With fifteen minutes of film to go, the screen was simply a blur as the camera spun around and the shrill blast of gorilla cries filled the theater.
Sasha glanced at his mother, who was watching the screen with a smile on her face.
“Shall we leave?” Maya asked, looking back toward the sound of what appeared to be a fight in the rear.
Lydia gestured for her daughter-in-law to sit still.
By the time the film ended and the lights came on, there were less than two hundred people left in the theater. Four young men and a woman stood up and applauded furiously, shouting “Bravo!” and looking defiantly at those who did not join them. Willery glanced back at his supporters with a thin smile.
Tkach had a headache. The sound and the spinning image had affected him like a drug. His first impulse was to apologize to his wife and mother, but Maya simply agreed with him and Lydia actually looked elated.
“Not as bad as I thought,” she said, leading the way up the aisle, ignoring the clusters of still arguing moviegoers.
Tkach didn’t bother to look back at Willery, and that was unfortunate for at that moment Willery was looking around the nearly empty theater, lifting his dark glasses and scanning the walls and seats. Tkach, if he had seen him, would have wondered what he was looking for, and almost certainly he would have concluded that Willery was looking for something connected with the map of festival theaters Karpo had given to Rostnikov. Tkach might even have concluded that Willery was looking for a hidden bomb, which is exactly what the filmmaker was doing.
Feeling misunderstood, angry, and hostile, James Willery was thinking that it might not be such a bad idea to blow up this theater while some of the people who had just ridiculed his film were still in it. James Willery had a marvelous imagination, and he could quite clearly imagine the writhing bodies, the screams, the burned survivors fleeing blindly.
The cluster of students remained after everyone else had gone. The ushers came in and told them to clear out because the next feature would be starting soon. Willery considered beating a hasty retreat behind the screen, but the students had already begun moving toward him down the aisle.
It would do his ego some good, Willery thought, to have a few drinks with some people who would reassure him about his creation. After all, this Russian audience was not as sophisticated as those in London, Paris, New York, or San Francisco. Yes, a few drinks with these students would help him forget the audience. And the young woman in the group did not look bad at all. Maybe she would even help him forget for a while the bomb that was hidden somewhere in this theater and that he would detonate the following night.
The dark-eyed woman smiled at the young man next to her and nodded in appreciation at his assessment of the film he had seen a few hours ago. She had pleaded a headache, and now she was feigning interest in his infantile explanation of film, audience, and filmmaker.
He had forgotten that it was she who had urged him to see To the Left and arranged for him to get the tickets. In fact, she’d done it so skillfully that he’d thought it was his idea. She reached over in the bed and put her hand on his pale leg. She wondered how he would react if she squeezed him like a vise until he begged for release. Instead, she pretended that what he said was not only interesting but profound.
“And you had a drink with him?” she encouraged.
“He is brilliant,” said the young man, looking at her with drunken dancing eyes. “His grasp of the need for destruction of structure is so pure, so clear. No wonder he is rejected and scorned.”
“And,” she said, letting her hand move away when she realized he was too drunk to respond, “he seemed in a good mood even after what happened?”
“Distracted, perhaps, but brave. He was laughing,” said the young man with admiration. “They all sat there feeling so superior, neo-capitalists every one, and they couldn’t face a true act of artistic revolution. He laughed at them. He has an inner strength, that man.”
He will need it, she thought as the young man’s eyes closed and he fell asleep repeating “that man.”
She got up, then turned off the light, and climbed back into the narrow bed. She pushed the young man over, and he grunted petulantly.
The links were weak, perhaps, she thought. One or both might even break, but the job would be done. Of that she was quite sure.
She was asleep, as always, within minutes, a light sleep always on the edge of cautious consciousness. She had learned to sleep this way from the one who had taught her, who was now dead. She told herself that it was the sleep of the professional. She did not acknowledge that it was also the sleep of one who fears dreams.
From time to time, in spite of her training, she did fall into deep sleep for a few minutes, and the dream did come, the dream of circles within circles that turned to a spiral of wire on which she was skewered. She twisted downward on that spiral toward the ever narrowing center hidden in darkness, below which she would fall off the wire and plummet into the void.
She ground her teeth furiously, awakening herself. She sat up breathing deeply; it seemed she had a weight on her chest. The void surrounded her. She willed it away.
Beside her, she heard him snoring. It was reassuring for an instant, and then she hated having felt any reassurance in his presence. She got out of bed and went to the window, wishing it were Sunday.