‘Ah.’
‘We’ve also got prints of Bogs and Quicksand — those were the last two before Codename Orpheus and you can see his obsessions developing, his preoccupation with wetness and ooze as primal mindscape and his vision of a discarded world. Anyhow, without committing yourself at this point, do you think you like the idea in principle?’
‘Have you got a subject in mind for our film?’
‘Eurydice and Orpheus.’
‘But he’s already had a shot at that.’
‘As I’ve said, he’s obsessive. He says it’s an inexhaustible theme and he’s got a lot of new ideas for another approach.’
‘What sort of money are we approaching it with?’
‘We’ve got a budget of £250,000 per film; that works out at £8,000 each for director, composer, and writer, plus residuals. That’s not a lot of money but you’d be completely free to do what you like and I should think it might be quite fun if you’ve got the time to take it on.’
‘All of us getting paid the same, I’m surprised that Kraken agreed to that.’
‘He looks on this as a necessary exploration and he’s particularly keen on an equal partnership with no ego trips. I thought perhaps the four of us could meet for lunch. Would Thursday be all right for you, one o’clock at L’Escargot?’
‘That sounds fine.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to see Bogs and Quicksand and Codename Orpheus first.’
‘I’ll just have a look at Bogs to begin with, I’ll save the others for later.’
Forthryte arranged a screening of Bogs at Mythos for the next day, Saturday. I rang up Melanie to ask her along.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been phoning you for days.’
Oh yes, I said in my mind. Did you phone me on Monday as you said you would? Did you phone on Tuesday? ‘I went to The Hague,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Would you like to see Bogs with me tomorrow?’
‘The Kraken film? Yes, please.’
16 Blvgsvo
The plain white gothic capitals on the flickering black said:
BOGS BLVGSVO
‘What language is that?’ I said to Melanie.
‘He makes it up,’ she said. ‘He likes the effect of subtitles. In his book, The Flickering, he says that under our ordinary speech there are always invisible subtitles in an unknown tongue. In all of his films since 1975 the actors speak in English and the subtitles are in Krakenspeak.’
There was music, something rather like the Bach B Minor Mass played backwards, as words appeared on the screen:
Between the dead city and the threshing floors lay the bogland.
NIM VUGMIS NIM DENGSVO ZOKNIS NA BLVGSVODMA.
Squelching and sucking sounds were heard and from a very low angle we saw, black against a dark sky, bulky figures in wellingtons crossing a boggy landscape:
Three times daily came the messengers.
TIMTAM TOM RIG SHOLDIK.
Over the music there came snippets of voices speaking in several languages at irregular intervals as the scene cross-dissolved to two bearded men, well wrapped up, inside a very dark hut:
One day…
TOMZO…
‘I’m going to the bogs,’ said the man on the left.
VLAJO BLVGSVO.
‘Why?’ said the one on the right.
ZOM?
‘Why not?’ said the one on the left.
DOMZOM?
The two men stared hard at each other and cross-dissolved to a bog under a dark sky. The camera moved in to look at some water. Under the water was a woman in a wedding dress. Her mouth moved as the water became ice. She seemed to be saying, ‘Never.’ There was no subtitle.
‘Did she say “Never”?’ I said to Melanie.
Melanie nodded.
A man sat by a blackboard with his head in his hands. ‘There is only one quintessential image,’ he said.
ZVEM NULZI LODZA NURVURLI
A little boy appeared and opened a newspaper-wrapped parcel to show a small severed hand. ‘Look what they gave me,’ he said to the camera.
NAL ZAL RIN DOMZI
A flight of white pigeons filled the dark sky as the camera tilted down to their reflection in the water which was no longer frozen.
‘The blackness is the ultimate dialectic,’ said the bearded man who had been on the left in the hut. He was sitting in the water.
LEVSNOK FURMIL SNEV.
‘I think I want to go now,’ I said.
‘I’ll see you later then,’ said Melanie. ‘I want to see the whole film.’
I sneaked out of the building without meeting anyone — the place was mostly empty — came out into the thin wintry sunlight of Wardour Street and went home.
The film had started around two o’clock in the afternoon. I was expecting Melanie by five or six at the latest but she didn’t turn up till well after eight.
‘I thought I’d get here sooner,’ she said, ‘but Gösta Kraken turned up at Mythos and we went for drinks after the screening.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Did he show you his ultimate dialectic?’
‘Ah. Here we go.’
‘No, there you went.’
‘That sounds rather final.’
‘There you went for drinks.’
‘Yes, there I went for drinks, I do that sometimes, I’m a drinkivorous person. Why’d you walk out of Bogs anyhow?’
‘I find that I don’t want to be with Gösta Kraken’s mind all that much.’
‘That’s going to be a problem if you’re working on a film with him, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe I can live with it. I need the money.’
‘Are you sure it’s his mind that’s bothering you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean him and Luise.’
‘He’s told you about that, has he.’
‘Yes, he has. It seems to have a mystical significance for him, as if it’s created a metaphysical bond between you and him and Istvan.’
‘Feels more like bondage.’
‘Maybe bondage is what you really like. You seem to enjoy harnessing yourself with regrets and chaining yourself to the past.’
‘I’m not even sure there is a past,’ I said. ‘My life is littered with old action like empty beer cans but it’s all in the present.’
‘Let’s get some full beer cans and some fish and chips,’ she said.
We went to a place near her flat in the North End Road. The fluorescent lighting and the white tiling amplified the roads and voices in my mind while asseverating the particularity of this only, this distinct and unmerged moment. I noticed again Melanie’s eyes as they had looked the first time I saw her, open wide, with white showing all round the pupils. Clip-clop, her little black boots had gone in the shady grove of her sudden woodland. She had just said something.
‘What did you say?’ I said.
‘I said that fish and chip shops are metaphysical.’
‘Everything is.’
We took the fish and chips and beer up to her flat near the West Kensington underground station. The room that overlooked the street was large and uncluttered; the walls and ceiling were white, the overhead light was an orange paper globe; there were blue drapes on the wide window; there were a drawing table with a typewriter and an Anglepoise lamp on it, a blue wooden chair, two red filing cabinets, and some unpainted bookshelves in which among the books and typescripts were a tape deck, amplifier, tuner, turntable and speakers. There was a large print of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gipsy. Under the desert moon the gipsy woman slept, the lion watched, the stillness waited. In the background a green river and a range of mountains.