“You do get to sleep pretty quickly,” Jonna said. “It can’t hurt you to not have a bad conscience once in a while for twenty minutes. Or ten. Now you can go and turn it on.”
The little red light came on. Fassbinder confronted them in all his exquisite, controlled violence. It was very late when he was done. Jonna switched on the lamp, slipped the cassette into its cover, and put it on the shelf labelled “Fassbinder”.
“Mari,” she said, “are you unhappy that we don’t see people?”
“No, not any more.”
“That’s good. I mean, if we did see them, what would it be like? Like always, exactly like always. Pointless chatter about inessentials. No composition, no guiding idea. No theme. Isn’t that right? We know roughly what everyone will say; we know each other inside out. But here on our videos every remark is significant, nothing is arbitrary. Everything is considered and well formulated.”
“All the same,” said Mari, “sometimes one of us might say something unexpected, something that didn’t fit, something really out of the ordinary that made you sit up and take notice. You know, something irrational.”
“Yes, I know. But make no mistake: great directors know all about the irrational. You talk about things that don’t fit — they use such things, with a purpose, as an essential part of the whole. Do you know what I mean? Apparent quirkiness but with a point. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
“But they’ve had time,” Mari objected. “We don’t always have time to think, we just live! Of course a filmmaker can depict what you call quirkiness, but it’s still just canned. We’re in the moment. Maybe I haven’t thought this through… Jonna, these films of yours are fantastic, they’re perfect. But when we get involved in them as totally as we do, isn’t that dangerous?”
“How do you mean, dangerous?”
“Doesn’t it diminish other things?”
“No. Really good films don’t diminish anything, they don’t close things off. On the contrary, they open up new insights, they make new thoughts thinkable. They crowd us, they deflate our slovenly lifestyle, our thoughtless way of chattering and pissing away our time and energy and passion. Believe me, films can teach us a huge amount. And they give us a true picture of the way life is.”
Mari laughed. “Of our slovenly lifestyle, you mean? You mean, maybe they can teach us to piss our lives away with a little more intelligence, a little more elegance?”
“Don’t be an ass. You know perfectly well…”
Mari interrupted. “And if film is some kind of edifying god, wouldn’t it be dangerous to try and emulate your gods, always knowing that you’re coming up short? That everything you do is somehow badly directed?”
The telephone rang and Jonna went to answer it. She listened for a long time, then she said, “Wait a minute, I’ll give you his number. Stay calm, it’ll just take a second.” Mari heard her finish the conversation. “Call back if there’s any news. Bye.”
“What’s happened?” Mari said.
“That was Alma again. Her cat jumped out the window. It was trying to catch a pigeon.”
“You’re not serious! Mosse? I didn’t realise; you were so short with her…”
“I gave her the number for the vet,” Jonna said. “You have to be short and matter-of-fact about accidents. You were talking about badly directed.”
“Not now!” Mari burst out impatiently. “Their Mosse… Jonna, I think I’ll go to bed.”
“No,” Jonna said. “We have to wait. She might call again and need comfort. You have to answer and talk to her for a while. You know, share it out fair and square.” She hung the silver cloth over the television set to protect it from dust and morning sun, and lit the last cigarette of the day.
The Hunter
THE SKERRY WAS SHAPED LIKE AN ATOLL — granite surrounding a shallow lagoon or tidal pool with a narrow passage out to the sea. At low water, the lagoon became a lake. Seals had played there in the old days, before they were shot or moved on to quieter locations. Now eider hens used it for a nursery. The cottage stood on one side of the lagoon; the other side was sea-bird territory. Guano streaked the granite like snow, and white as snow were the nesting gulls and terns and the long, showy borders of daisies in every rocky crevice.
On the highest outcropping, a black-backed gull with a single chick had taken up residence, a huge bird with black wing feathers and a beak like a bird of prey. Their distinct separation from the rest of the settlement seemed to express superiority, contempt. Now and then, as if in distraction, the gull would make its way down the mountain to devour an eider chick. Hundreds of screaming birds would rise in a cloud each time and, one by one, dive steeply on the gull — but never come too close. And the lord of the island would snap at them absent-mindedly and return to his own territory, where he would stand stock-still, distinguished, statuesque on the atoll’s highest point.
Jonna liked eider chicks, especially after one of them wandered up to the cottage and insisted on following her. Finally she got the chick into a basket and rowed around for an hour before spotting a likely eider family, distant enough from the territory of the black-backed gulls. “Some day I’ll murder those black-backed gulls,” she said. “You just can’t work in peace around here with all these stupid birds.”
One morning, Jonna was oiling her pistol out on the granite slope when, almost without thinking, she fired off a shot across the lagoon in the direction of the gull’s stolid silhouette. Whether it was to scare him or to shoot him is uncertain. In any case, the bird collapsed and fluttered down from its mountain top. Mari hadn’t seen it, and she was used to hearing Jonna shoot at tin cans. Jonna went to finish off the bird. She was very upset, but at the same time proud of her marksmanship — it was at least a hundred metres across the lagoon. But the gull was nowhere to be found.
Two days later, Mari came running across the rock. “Jonna,” she called, “it can’t fly and it can’t walk, and the chick doesn’t know where to go!”
When they came to the water, the whole shoreline was empty.
But the dismal morning inevitably came when Mari found the black-backed gull dead on the rocks, and by then it was full of worms.
“Typical,” Jonna said. “Of course you had to be the one to find it. Well, okay, I’m sorry. I shot it.” And she added, “At a hundred metres.”
“I might have known,” Mari burst out. “I should have guessed! You’ve killed the King. He was awful, but he belonged to the island, to us! You just love guns! You just can’t stop! So now you can take the feathers. Take them. Go ahead, take them! They’re just what you need for your blessed graphic acid bath, aren’t they?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Jonna began, but Mari interrupted and began speculating cruelly, thoughtlessly, about when the chick would eventually float ashore. Then she went down to the live-box and put on a demonstration by slaughtering perch, a job she despised and generally left completely to Jonna.
Jonna detached the long pinions, washed and dried them and put them in her work drawer, farthest in. All day she waited for the unavoidable sequel, but it was not until they had laid out their nets that Mari began talking about the concept of the hunter. Somewhere she’d read that people could be broadly divided into hunters, gardeners and fishermen. “The hunter type”, she explained, “is naturally the most admired. He’s considered to be bold and a little dangerous. You know, a person who plays for high stakes, who can be ruthless and take chances that other people don’t dare take. Isn’t that right?”