Weep For The Gravest Of Our Misfortunes: Two And A Half Rolls (423 hits)
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Submitted by Zampano (View user info) at 2007-04-19 09:04:04 EDT
Act I - I Find The Pretty Girl - http://www.ubersite.com/m/100589
Act II - The Hard Evidence - http://www.ubersite.com/m/100756
Act III of IV
Two And A Half Rolls
I think I cling to Meredith still for two reasons. Firstly, she feeds me without question, especially when I am down on my luck and looking like it. More importantly, she always has a pot of coffee on brew when I am in her apartment. Or, if she is out, we walk to our favorite café. The trip is many blocks along busy Chicago streets, and winds off the lake whip our faces no matter which way we turn. Cold is unbearable, cold is cold, and this is especially true in the winter, and we will settle for a diner across the street if the snows bite the corners of our eyes too hard.
It's terrible in the diner. Everything smells like eggs and dishwasher fluid, and mystery food-clumps stick to all of the plates and cups. What's worse, the coffee tastes like shit.
"This tastes like shit," I tell Meredith.
"Don't smoke when you're drinking coffee," she replies. "You'll give yourself a heart attack one of these days." I puff along, and I know she likes it. The day I stop smoking is the day I cease to be a European to her. Sometimes that is all that binds us together, my air of the foreign and romantic. I'm too old to be pictured in an outdoor café with my cigarette in one hand and journal in the other. Playing chess with other elderly gents in the park, I can see that, and I know that Meredith does as well.
I meet Meredith by chance on my first outing in Chicago, shortly after I arrived to America. Nineteen and carrying the entirety of my life on my back, I stayed in New York long enough to learn that what little money I'd toiled to earn before my trip was pretty much worthless. Just long enough to feel neither an open arm and secure embrace, nor the averted gaze of disgust or disapproval: only an indifference to me and my existence as a boy emerged out of the crater of the east. The fires were finally dying down, the last of the bodies taken care of. People are no longer just pretending to build anew. Across a sea, not a brick is out of place, and nobody here cares for me. I move westwards, failing to find the stepping stone I need to justify the trip, to justify having found my way out of a deep and dark wood that I considered the latter years of my childhood.
I walk this city, this Chicago, in a head-down daze, moving up and down streets and occasionally into stores to avoid the cold. I take elevators up to heights that drain the courage from my knees, and kind strangers have to help me look away from the windows. What strange breed of bird-men built these steel towers of Babel? The stairs leading out from under the crowns of cirrus are endless in number, and I nearly fall down every single one.
It takes more than a mile for me to realize that there is a flyer stuck to the bottom of my boot, and while I want to throw it away, it whispers a little secret to me. "I've got something you need."
Beyond Fall Rot: Scenes From German-Occupied France. An exhibition of photography spanning the surrender of France to the Germans in World War II to the end of the war.
I don't need you.
Touch me, hold me. Just don't forget me.
I don't need you.
And I believe you. Admission is free.
How can I say no?
I am sorry that I know most of these photographs. Some are iconic. Black-white phalanxes on the Champs-Elysees, framed by a most triumphant arch. My arch, stolen and perverted. Others I know from my brief education in exile. They are from the newspapers smuggled into our communes and underground shacks, the only place I could pretend to be learning anything. It's funny now. I read arithmetic and philosophy while artillery bu-thuds in the countryside. Windows rattle. Plaster falls across my book and hides the next problem. The newspaper shows me wonderfully flat representations of the dark-eyed men from the east, men who should not be dark-eyed. How many flags do they need?
Why am I here?
Separate from the main gallery I find a room, and I am one of two patrons. There are exactly sixty-one photos, sixty of which are similar in dimension. The sixty-first is blown up and given its own wall, an oaken frame. Minutes fall off the clock, cluster at my feet. Sixty-one photos.
Why am I here? I can't breathe.
"May I ask you something?" the other patron, a woman of austere beauty, asks. "Do...do you happen to like this exhibit?"
Words, thick and fat, turn my throat to glass slivers.
"I'm sorry, I don't mean to be so presumptuous...I, well...no, I'm sorry."
Air. Breathe. "No, madame...madam, I. Uh. I like it."
She smiles.
"It's my exhibit, but it's not my photography. I was just barely a teenager when these were taken, and half a world away. My father was a war photographer. These are his. When he came back, he would talk about how he had anticipated to use at least twenty rolls, and most likely more, but that he only ever shot two and a half. A little over, really. He overshot by one. Just these sixty-one photos, and he never developed the film. He just talked about it. His first week...I'm sorry, do you mind that I'm telling you this? Were you about to move on to the other ex—"
"Oh, no, it's quite all right."
"Well, he shot the two and a half rolls in a single day after an Allied sweep drove occupying Germans out of this village. They had been too late, though. My dad said that the fighting did very little damage and, as you can see in the photos, it was absolutely destroyed. The Germans alone did that, with every person living there. My father talked for weeks about them. At meals, in the car, just before I went to bed...he didn't want to face the developed photos, but I don't think he wanted to forget them either. He said to me one night he was in a kind of limbo. Really, his actual words. To my best guess, he was trying to decide what he was going to do with this knowledge. He held a town's legacy, its last mark, as captured through three or four different lenses.
"Ultimately, I made the choice for him. I feel this is probably what he would have wanted."
"I'm sorry for the loss. Was it long after his return that he died?"
"Oh, he's not dead. At least, not to my knowledge. He just left one night a couple weeks after he'd returned to the States. Europe changed him. I got a letter from him once, and he told me these wondrous things he planned on doing with his life. The war took twenty years off of him. He left all his photography behind, and I followed after his work."
"Sixty-one photos, and they changed a life."
"Yeah," she says. "I put every single one into the exhibit. Some of them are the same object from the relatively same angle, or just a little blurrier than its twin. He described every single one as though it were an important document. Each one...I mean, each one is a statement from the slain villagers."
She really believes that. There's nothing to say here. Not by me, not by her, and especially not by these photos. One frame, one fraction of a moment, one thousand words. That is an injustice to the stampede tracks in the mud in the streets, identifiably human only by a dropped porcelain doll. Half of its eggshell face is shattered, but her drawn lips are still pursed in a half-smile. The owner is gone. The owner is ash. If I go back, this is all I will find. There are no more buildings, and the cobblestones have been picked up or hidden in the undergrowth, and weeds have webbed over the burnt timbers and sooty fingerbones, but, sticking out of the dried earth, are these porcelain shards. The single evidence of the conflagration, the immolation.
Each photo is just a fraction of a moment. They are all so tiny, maybe a foot square. Except the last one, the one that has its own wall. I could stand inside it, draw it up to my chin like a blanket.
"They burnt everything."
"I know," she says. "Isn't it horrible? Would you care for some coffee?"
I accept. She slipped it in so casually. Of course I accept.
She takes me to a diner that we'll be coming to for another thirty years, at least. But that's later. What matters is the now of the thing. "This coffee, it tastes like shit," I tell her, and my accent sneaks through. Eet tastes like sheet.
"I bet all of our coffee must taste bad to you," she says.
"No, this is just bad. For anyone."
Back at her place, she has me smoke for her. I'm a plaything. Alien, but new and exciting, like a bird of paradise for a pet. I am Europe for her. What else has her father told her from across the sea? He would have spared her the horrors of war, but for the village he happened to photograph. He would tell her of the open-air courts and gardens of any city or town, and the richness of food and drink and tobacco, and how every man was a brother, every woman a mother. She wants me to take her there, in a way similar but unique to the way her father took her there. She forces me to light the last cigar I bought in Liverpool before boarding the ship to cross the Atlantic. How she wears that smoke.
I don't love her the first night. The condition is that she moves the photo, the largest frame, from the exhibit into her bedroom. On our third night, she leads me in and down. She won't let me speak English tonight, but that is fair. I don't look her in the face. My attention is drawn just over her shoulder, to the once-bare wall behind. I burn, and in more ways than one. I tell her things, I tell her truths that she needs to know. "It was mine," I shout or whisper. "The village. It was mine." She can't hear it. She doesn't understand it. The language is mine, and I am Europe. I could be speaking Brazilian, but I am still Europe. "It was mine! It! Was! Mine!"
She sleeps so deeply across my chest. Fever in her cheeks. Drumroll in her veins. She must be dreaming. Oh, Meredith. What have I done to you?
I squint against the darkness, at the man-sized photo. It's a simple enough image, of a small girl laying face down in a field. Wheat grows up all around her. The dress is an old one and smells of must. This is a detail only I know. Same for the knowledge that she is pretty, sparrow-pretty, and the last thing she ever did was try to catch up with the boy to whom she gave her last present, her length of lace.
I never waited. I never knew her name.
User Reviews
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-09-19 15:22:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-04-24 12:04:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent.
There isn't much else to say. This one gave me goosebumps. I like the way you build things up and then confirm that, yes indeed that sneaking suspicion niggling at the back of your mind IS the next plot twist.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-04-20 00:45:19 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Cool.
Don't forget me, I can't see a thing. My monitor is braille.
Submitted by Zampano (user info) at 2007-04-20 00:41:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by Stagger_Lee
Ranking: 2
I read this because your name interested me when I saw it on some other post. It was good.
What does your name mean?
________________
"Zampano" was the name of the narrator of The Navidson Record portion of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, one of my favorite books that is so intricately woven that I could do it no justice in trying to explain it here. "Zampano" was also a character in the 1954 Italian film La Strada.
In the novel, Zampano is an elderly man and is also very blind, in the tradition of some of the greatest storytellers (Homer, Milton, that plagarizing bitch Helen Keller). He was always an interesting character to me, so I figured, why not? Plus it has a kind of exotic, practically memorable ring to it.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-04-20 00:33:49 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
That is, when I read the first one.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-04-20 00:32:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I read this because your name interested me when I saw it on some other post. It was good.
What does your name mean?
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-04-19 16:58:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by YELLOW-MAN (user info) at 2007-04-19 16:27:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Merlina (user info) at 2007-04-19 10:34:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-04-19 09:14:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent work.
Submitted by Coleslaw_Murphy (user info) at 2007-04-19 09:55:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Damn, I better go read the first two.
I'll be back.
Submitted by ChaosJester (user info) at 2007-04-19 09:26:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
purdy freakin' good...
I was a bit disappointed at the beginning, but you pulled it off in the end.
Really powerful language.
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-04-19 09:14:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent work.
Submitted by orph (user info) at 2007-04-19 09:13:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Good.