this!!!
Since then I have more faith in misplaced trifles than in rehearsed stories, which always feel like something gutted, stuffed, and roasted before being served for me to gobble up. I believe in remembered mannerisms and scribbles in books, accidental scowls caught by a friend’s camera, and strange tooth marks on cigarette holders. I am the detective Columbo of the new century—and please don’t laugh at me! I know that these excavated remains of vanished civilizations, the many, many civilizations that had once existed under people’s names, do not lie. If we have any hope of understanding anything about another’s life, this this!!! is it. We’ve heard all the other stories before, thank you very much, and we’re sick of them.
I can no more pass up these scattered shiny beads than a raccoon can ignore a broken mirror. And I mean literally: I pick them up and drag them to my lair. I have a whole collection of them already: my own disordered notes in various notebooks, on random scraps of paper, on festival booklets and concert programs, on the backs of press releases, on any other printed matter, and lengths of film from the cutting-room floor, twisted and kept, for reasons unknown, in an old computer box—all in utter disarray. Why, you could very well ask, am I holding on to this poorly scanned drawing by a little girl from Pripyat who died of leukemia and whose strangely unbrokenhearted parents were convinced she’d been destined to artistic fame? It’s hard to tell whether this really was the case: all children’s drawings are interesting, and, in this one, a brown hippo stands on the shore of a blue lake, rounded toward the horizon. The picture didn’t make it into the Chernobyl show (I remember I wanted to keep the program austere, somber, inexorable, no sentiments, no snivels), and the girl’s mother was upset with me: I had taken away her role of the tragically lost young genius’s parent, and what could I give her in return—a dead child? Still, even if there hadn’t been the upset mother and my guilt, I wouldn’t have it in me to kill the picture—so I’m keeping it, as if hoping to find, one day, the proper place for it.
Essentially, none of my shows ever grew out of the themes that I so thoughtfully pitched to my producers and colleagues. They were all conceived out of just such small details, some hook that caught my attention and teased with the promise of inaccessible secrets, like a distant glowing window seen at night from a passing train: Who lives there? What are they doing? Why is the light on so late? As a rule, such things did not make the final cut, either remaining somewhere beyond the scope of the lens, or making a brief appearance in the background, so inconspicuous that I alone could find them, like a signature hidden in the corner of the picture. Or, to be completely honest, like a note acknowledging another defeat, equally private, because I hadn’t once been able to make something—something I felt it was possible to make if only one had the lost secret code—of my pile of beads and gravel, hadn’t managed to turn these pieces so that a single change of light could illuminate someone’s life completely, totally, all pieces in their places, hadn’t once created this!!!.
Which does not mean that one should stop trying.
I have no other method—if this even counts as one. I don’t believe in other methods—I think they all have been milked dry. And to do things any other way would simply be no fun.
I don’t know what drew me into the photograph where, among five Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers, second from the right, stood a young clear-eyed, bareheaded woman (“A unit,” Artem whispered, pushing the print across the desk toward me, careful to touch it very lightly with his fingertips as if the picture, if not handled with caution, could explode with a gunshot) with bangs curled into a Hollywood roll, as was the wartime fashion. She seemed to smile at me, this lady whose small waist was cinched so smartly, even whimsically, with the uniform canvas belt, and whose entire posture exuded a calm, self-possessed confidence—not of military discipline, but rather fox hunting on a family’s grand estate: here’s the young mistress waiting for her horse to be brought up, the pack of purebred hounds straining their leashes and whimpering excitedly just outside the frame. She would look perfectly complete with an English riding crop and a pair of white gloves, and yet her sophistication (so out of place in the middle of the woods) also had a wondrously feminine quality—consolingly cool, like a strong, kind hand against a hot forehead—that must have had a soothing effect on horses and hounds, and young men with automatic weapons. She was the only one among them who smiled, her lips drawn in a barely discernible curve.
“What a beautiful woman,” I observed, for some reason in a whisper, although she was not so much beautiful, in the usual sense, as radiant: even in the faded picture, she was surrounded by a visible halo of light, like an Old Master painting of an angel sent to deliver the glorious word—“Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard.” Artem blinked sideways and grunted either in agreement or, conversely, was simply shocked by my silliness, as any historian would be after he’d just shared a prized archival document with a total philistine—all she can think of is pretty women!
Nevertheless he responded, with his thin, crooked grin that seemed to mock preemptively what he was about to say, somewhat lewdly, “So which one of the four do you figure she slept with?”
“This one,” I said, without hesitation, pointing to the guy on the far right, with wolfishly close-set eyes and a crooked nose, letting Artem’s transparent implication slip without acknowledgment. (By then he and I hadn’t had sex for at least three months; I saw no reason to galvanize our naturally ebbing liaison and found a new excuse every time we ran into each other so that he may well have begun to suspect that I suffered from a mysterious chronic illness, a constant menstruation or something.) The wolfish guy posed with one foot forward, as if on the move, hand securely clenched around the hand guard of his rifle, which he used to balance himself like a walking stick, and my certainty about him was all the more puzzling because had I been that woman, I would have chosen another—that one, standing most apart, the last on the left who looked to the side, as if the whole photographing business had nothing to do with him. Of all the men in the picture, with simple, peasant-looking faces, chiseled by many generations of hard physical work (And isn’t war, too, hard physical work?), he alone was truly handsome, a dashing brunet, a perfected and ennobled clean-shaved incarnation of Clark Gable with unaffected, long-buried sorrow congealed in the dark eyes. Clark Gable couldn’t muster such sorrow for the most lavish fees; this was something cultivated for years, not gained in an instant. This was the sorrow that filled our folk songs, all, it seems, in minor key—marches, ballads, doesn’t matter, the words don’t matter because they can’t contain this sadness or explain its origin, only music can—and the brunet had musical eyes, eyes that sang.