“I don’t know,” Mari said. But she did know. Suddenly she knew very well that deep down she didn’t like the painter colleagues who had done these undeniably very fine works. Mari began paying attention. As she watched Jonna rehang the pictures, it seemed to her that lots of things, including their life together, fell into perspective and into place, a summary expressed in distance or self-evident clustering. The room had changed completely.
When Jonna had taken her tape home with her, Mari marvelled all evening at how easy it is in the end to understand the simplest things.
Videomania
THEY LIVED AT OPPOSITE ENDS OF A LARGE APARTMENT building near the harbour, and between their studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s-land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains. She could pause on the way to listen to the rain on the metal roof, look out across the city as it lit its lights, or just linger for the pleasure of it.
They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected – those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.
When Mari came in, Jonna was on a ladder building shelves in her front hall. Mari knew that when Jonna started putting up shelves she was approaching a period of work. Of course the hall would be far too narrow and cramped, but that was immaterial. The last time, it was shelves in the bedroom and the result had been a series of excellent woodcuts. She glanced into the bathroom as she passed, but Jonna had not yet put printing paper in to soak, not yet. Before Jonna could do her graphic work in peace, she always spent some time printing up sets of earlier, neglected works – a job that had been set aside so she could focus on new ideas. After all, a period of creative grace can be short. Suddenly, and without warning, the pictures disappear, or they’re chased away by some interference – someone or something that irretrievably cuts off the fragile desire to capture an observation, an insight.
Mari went back to the hall and said she had bought milk and paper towels, two steaks, and a nailbrush, and it was raining.
“Good,” Jonna said. She hadn’t heard. “Could you grab that other end for a second? Thanks. This is going to be a new shelf for videos. Nothing but videos. Did I mention Fassbinder’s on tonight? What do you think? Should I build it right out to the door?”
“Yes, do. What time?”
“Nine-twenty.”
About eight they remembered Alma’s dinner. Jonna phoned her. “I’m sorry to call so late,” she said, “but you know, Fassbinder’s on this evening, and it’s the last time… What? No, that won’t work; we have to be here to cut out the commercials… Yes, it’s really too bad. But you know how I loathe those commercials; they can ruin the whole film. Say hello to everyone. We’ll see you… Yes, I will. Have fun. So long.”
“Was she mad?” Mari asked.
“Oh, you know. Apparently the woman hasn’t a clue about Fassbinder.”
“Should we unplug the phone?”
“If you want. Nobody’s going to call. They know better. Anyway, we don’t have to answer.”
The spring evenings had grown long, and it was hard to darken the room. They sat in their separate chairs and waited for Fassbinder, their silence a respectful preparation. They had waited this way for their meetings with Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder, and all the other honoured guests that Jonna had chosen and enthroned – the finest present she could give her friend.
Over time, these video evenings had become very important in Jonna and Mari’s lives. When the films were over, they talked about them, earnestly and in detail. Jonna put the cassette into a slipcover decorated in advance with text and pictures, copies from the film library she’d been collecting all her life, and the cassette was given its dedicated place on the shelves reserved for videos – an attractive, continuous surface of gold and soft colours with little flags on the backs showing the country where each film was made. Only very rarely did Jonna and Mari have time to see their films a second time. There was an uninterrupted flood of new ones to accommodate. They had long since filled every shelf in the house. The shelves in the hall were in fact badly needed.
Especially close to Jonna’s heart were the silent films in black-and-white; Chaplin, in particular, of course. Patiently, she taught Mari to understand the classics. She talked about her student years abroad, the cinema clubs, her rapture at seeing these films, sometimes several a day.
“You understand, I was possessed. I was happy. And now when I see them again, these classics, so awkwardly expressive, with the clumsy technology that was all they had, it’s like being young again.”
“But you never grew up,” said Mari innocently.
“Don’t be smart. They’re the real thing, those old films. The people who made them went all out, defied their limits. They’re hopeful films – young, courageous films.”
Jonna also collected what she called “pure movies” – Westerns, Robin Hood films, wild pirate romances, and a lot of other simple stories of justice, courage and chivalry. They stood alongside the films of contemporary multifaceted geniuses and defended their territory. Their slipcovers were blue.
Jonna and Mari sat in their separate chairs in the darkened room and waited for Fassbinder.
“Before I go to sleep,” Mari said, “you know, I think more about a film you’ve shown me than I do about all my worries, I mean all the things I’ve got to do and all the dumb things I’ve ever done… It’s sort of like your movies freed me from myself. I mean, of course it’s still me, but I’m not my own responsibility.”
“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 li
fe 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?”
Jonna went on whittling on her net peg, observing by and by that “There must be all kinds, but mostly people are a mixture of all three. Or all ninety-five, or whatever.”
“Yes, of course, but there are still typical cases of what we might call hunters. And they’re born that way.”
“Speaking of gulls,” Jonna said, “do you remember the one that broke its wing and crawled to the steps every day? I suppose you were being a gardener when you tried to comfort it with food it didn’t even have the strength to eat. And what happened? I threw the pike net over the poor thing’s head when you were off doing something else and took care of it quickly with a hammer. I’m sure it was full of worms. You can’t mend what’s totally broken. And for that matter, you were relieved. You admired me. You said so.”
“Well, yes,” Mari admitted, “but that was completely different. That’s anecdotal evidence.”
“There are times,” Jonna went on without listening, “there are times when a healthy ruthlessness is the right thing. What about that time those idiots came ashore in their horrible plastic boat – it was purple – and were going to shoot our birds before the season even opened?! And what’s more they were drunk, though that doesn’t excuse them. Remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“So you see what I mean. I went down to the shore and gave them a piece of my mind. No effect. They sneered at me and sauntered up onto the island with their shotguns.”
“They were dreadful,” Mari agreed.
“They were. And then I thought, the only right and just thing to do right now is to shoot holes in their boat. That would teach them, right? A couple of holes at the waterline, bang.”
“But how did they get home?!” Mari burst out.
“They had to bale. Or maybe they had rags.”
Jonna and Mari sat silent for a moment.
“Odd,” Mari said. “Did you say that was last year?”
“Yes. Or the year before. And the boat was violet. Lilac.”
“But are you absolutely sure you really shot holes in it, or did you just think about it?”
Jonna stood up and shoved the dinner dishes into the box under the bed. “Maybe I just thought about it,” she said then. “But the point ought to be clear enough. You have to realize that there always has to be an aggressor. Someone who attacks when no one else has the guts to get involved. To protect…”
“Ha!” Mari cried. “You’re very clever at getting me to go along with all sorts of things that are beside the point! The point is, you think guns are fun! Admit you think they’re fun! At midsummer you shot the stovepipe on the tent sauna full of holes, and the smoke’s been coming in ever since. Did I say a word about it? No. But let me tell you somet
hing once and for all: I loathe that pistol!”
Mari took the rubbish bin and went outside.
After a while, she came back.
“Jonna, they’re here again. The purple plastic boat. Can you go down and talk to them?”
“The nerve!” Jonna said. “But maybe they’ve come to apologize. They might even have brought water. Or wood. Wait. I’ll go down and see.”
When Jonna was halfway across the meadow, Mari came running after her. “Take this,” she said. “You never know.” And she handed her the pistol.
Catfishing
THE SUMMER HAD MOVED INTO JUNE. Slowly, thinking Mari didn’t notice, Jonna went from window to window, tapped the barometer, walked out on the slope or out on the point, came in again with comments about things that needed attention, complained about the gulls screaming and copulating to drive a person crazy, and spoke her mind about the local radio, which had the most idiotic programmes – for example, about amateurs who had shows and thought they were God’s gift to art. And the weather was implacably beautiful the entire time.
Mari said nothing. What could she say?
Finally Jonna got busy. She built up her great unassailable barricade against work, against the agony of work. With small, polished tools she began shaping exquisite small objects of wood, tinier and tinier, more and more beautiful. She visited the islands to the west looking for juniper; she walked the shoreline gathering unusual kinds of driftwood, odd shapes that might give her an idea. She arranged it all on her workbench in symmetrical piles, smaller ones, larger ones, and every piece of sea-polished wood had its own special potential to keep her from making pictures.