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• Gwenneth Boelens
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A siren wails across the level sands from various directions. There is no way of telling where the source of the sound could be.

– One minute, someone says.

People start pushing and shoving.

– Stay down.

– But I’m sticking out.

– You’ll be fine. It won’t come to that.

– How could you possibly know?

The last one pushes at the others again. They settle into a mass.

– Do you have children? he asks me.

I nod.

– What are we doing here, in God’s name?

– Shut your trap, another man says.

The silence lasts for seconds. Instinctively, the men bow their heads. I can feel the boy behind me laying his on my back. I can’t be sure I’m not imagining it, but even with my forehead pressed against the sandy wall of the trench and my eyes squeezed shut, I see a flash of light. Suddenly a shock wave travels through the ground, rippling the desert floor like a sheet. Then a low roar comes crashing over us, pressing us down, as if bulldozers were rolling over the trench.

Without raising my head over the edge, I open my eyes. Sand and dust fall onto my neck. I can’t see a thing, not even the wall of the trench, my fingers digging into the dry soil. The sand gets into everything—my nostrils, my ears, the collar and sleeves of my jacket. When all I can hear is the whisper of shifting dust, I finally dare to raise my head a little. I can feel a warm wind, warmer than the desert air.

– It’s coming this way, the man next to me shouts. There’ll be nothing left of us.

“It won’t be long,” Parisa said apologetically. Turning in her seat, she accidentally unclipped her seatbelt. She pushed it aside airily. “They never work anyway.”

“Is this an expensive neighbourhood?” I asked.

She nodded. “Cleaner air.”

“Where does your circle of friends live?”

“Scattered around Tehran. Most of them live with their parents, in the suburbs.”

“The good parts.”

She shrugged. “What’s the difference if you cannot leave?”

We took a turn into a narrow side street and stopped in front of a fence. I could look under the apartment building. The entrance looked well maintained. There were parked cars maybe two generations younger than the dented working horse that had carried us all the way up from the city centre. We were let in by a buzzer and took the elevator to the top floor. Navid’s room, an attic perched on a flat roof, was directly above his parent’s home. The access door to the roof was open. There was a faint smell of marijuana. Navid welcomed us rather phlegmatically, but the willingness with which he set up his audio equipment conveyed a concealed joy.

“Nickel, why are we walking through these woods?”

“To see where this path leads.”

“What are you hoping to find?”

“Hoping to find? I have no idea. The remains of a penal colony, I guess.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Scared? Of what?”

“Bodies.”

I knew what had given him that idea. A couple of days before, I had read him a passage about a mass grave. It described corpses sliding down a mountainside after an overfilled grave had burst open. The permafrost had kept the bodies perfectly intact.

“Or did they get rid of all that?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

He stopped and pointed his camera at the cart track, which at this point was almost entirely overgrown. He was unaware of his shoe sinking into the muddy ground.

“Are you hoping somewhere inside that we find a mass grave at the end of this path?”

“Somewhere inside? What’s that supposed to mean? Deep down in my heart? Jesus.”

I started walking again.

“You don’t really want to go that far, do you?” he shouted.

I shook my head. “We passed that point a long time ago. Whatever we find now, we’ll just have to accept it. We can’t hit rewind any more. If you’re so keen on making a documentary, why don’t you just interview yourself?”

He was silent.

“You know why we’re here. Everything we’ve done has been leading up to this. We want to get an impression of what it was like by standing in the place where it happened. We’re not tourists. We’re trying to rouse something that lies slumbering beneath this landscape. Otherwise you could just as well make some garden-variety travel film, and it would never occur to us that the road we just cycled on might contain the crushed bones of forced labourers.”

Behind me I heard the camera snap shut. “You’re just afraid of feeling empty. You always have been.”

“And now?” she said, as she lowered her hands.

“Focus.”

She pulled the black cloth over her head and rested the lead-weighted hem in a fold of the bellows.

“Well?” he inquired.

“Shapes in a mist.”

He chuckled silently. “That is unavoidable today.”

“So, a sharp mist,” she understood. As she pressed the loupe against the focusing screen, her breathing created vapour on the ground glass. She fumbled vainly with her right arm for the wheel at the end of the focusing stage.

“Here,” he said as he guided her hand. “Use the pieces of ice on the ground.”

As she moved the lens inwards with the wheel, the frozen ground appeared upside down at the top of the image. She focused on an almost imperceptible dark form, a curve that loomed up out of the whiteness. It pierced the fog like the bow of a ship in a miniature world.

“What was it again, one stop overexposure?”

“At least. You only have whites, you have to compensate.”

He handed her the light meter. A ribbed white slide was positioned in front of the selenium sensors to temper the incidence of light. She pointed the meter towards the landscape in front of her, pressed the switch on the side of the apparatus and took a reading. He nodded as he took the light meter and replaced it in his jacket pocket. She adjusted the aperture, attached the cable release, closed the shutter and pulled the lever to cock it. She then stood behind the camera, took the black metal cassette from him and clamped it under the focusing screen. She pulled the slide sideways so that the film in the camera was uncovered and raised her hand with the cable release clasped in her fingers. This is how she envisaged herself and Lev, viewed from behind, standing in front of the white landscape, motionless, her hand raised. She peered over the camera at the Arctic Ocean hidden from view and listened to their breathing. Then she pressed the shutter release.

“This was an incredibly difficult bit to write,” he said in a low voice.

Hauser avoided his eyes. “Was it?”

“I get distracted,” the screenwriter continued. “Happens every time. I watch movies, sort my photos, listen to music, read the paper—it’s a nightmare.”

Hauser nodded. He had no idea what the screenwriter was talking about.

“It’s because of the high expectations. It has to be memorable. A new image. Nothing less. But when I’m under pressure, I always take the path of least resistance. A scene like this, for example, I can write out of the corner of my eye, in just a few seconds, between one thing and another, making coffee and watching TV. It has nothing to do with concentration any more. It’s pure fragmentation.”

“Fragmentation,” Hauser repeated.

“Yes. As a mode. Instead of concentration. We don’t need to pause for breath anymore as we process all the images coming at us. Those days are behind us. The transition from one thing to another is seamless.”

The director looked distractedly over his shoulder at the screenwriter, who broke off his monologue. In the silence that followed, Hauser returned his attention to the actors. The man was still lying on the floor, while the boy was walking away, into the depths of the warehouse. The image of the child making his way alone stirred something inside him that he couldn’t suppress simply by swallowing. It was shattering.

“Okay, stop,” the director said suddenly. “Let’s pack it in.”

As the entire crew slowly set to work, he rushed ahead of them to the door, fishing his sunglasses out of his pocket and flipping them open. “Thanks,” he mumbled as he went by.

“That was...” Hauser began, hurrying after him, “That was...”

“That was a one-time deal,” he replied brusquely. “I’m scrapping that scene. I had to see it to be sure I could get rid of it.”

Dazed, I walk over the grass and flop down at a picnic table in the shade under the trees. The confirmation that Jacq is here, at the moment when I had stopped believing in it, has knocked the wind out of me. For the first time I become aware that I have been following him like a detective, that I am sticking my nose into his affairs. What am I doing here? Clearly no one is in need of my ominous tourism. Do I wish to confront him? Now that I have come across his tracks, I can no longer pretend to myself that I just wanted to know what he is up to. No, I want him to account for himself. Why has he left me alone, what was so important, and what merits so much secrecy?

In the meantime I pick at the shapes carved in the table-top. Squares have been carved in various places with a sharp object, divided into four smaller squares. The figure strikes me as a remnant of a repentant vandal: from my youth I remember that this is the quickest way of erasing a swastika. Joining up the arms so that you are left with just a square comprised of four smaller squares. How often have I had to do this, confronted with the vague sense of shame that remained after I had defiled a school desk or a toilet with the square icon? The figure never failed to shock me, even though I drew the offensive interplay of angular lines in a spirit of wantonness. To me it was a symbol of the unspeakable; not erasing it would have been a grave error. But the sensation of the transgression and then subsequently correcting myself, brought me close enough to the limit to taste what it was like to be evil.

A framed portrait hung above the chimney breast. Even without a proper view he was able to recognize it: the frontal one, with the uniform. He had it too, at home. Everybody did. He pictured the dust on the frame, on the furniture, on the floor. The smell inside the house. He pictured the man for whom it was built, but who had never been there.

On the terrace were four garden chairs resting against a table on their front legs. A masoned windbreak. A stained gas tank. A small pool with a concrete edge, empty. The lawn between the terrace and the empty swimming pool had been trimmed no so long ago. They kept it, for the absent one. But that did not exceed the lawn. The molehills were merely leveled. A sublime metaphore for the nation: a superficial order that was being eaten away from within.

As he quietly made his way through the thicket, the framed portrait stuck in his mind, as if it kept staring at him. That one sole image, he thought, in an endless reproduction, should illustrate an absolute ban on all images.

It’s been years since you were exposed to so much light. It reminds you of that very first time, when you were still blank and greeted by a joyful scene. Then too, it happened with an unexpected flash searing a drawing of light onto your dark support.  That’s what started it all, fifty-three years ago. Almost right after that, you were submerged into some foul fluid, in pitch-dark, time and time again. It bit into you, it made you swell up. Then, for the first time, you were exposed to the light of a lamp for a prolonged period of time. They cut you up into equal pieces and clasped you into a rectangular housing, so people could take in your fixed impression through a small window preventing them from soiling you with their sweaty fingers.

Strangely enough, the doctor is wearing cotton gloves this time. Together with others, you are subjected to a slow procedure scanning you from both sides in a light box. Nothing escapes scrutiny. Your inside is exposed, fragmented and reconstructed elsewhere. It seems you are being discarded. Afterwards you are brought back to your original state, with your wafer-thin essence joined without stitches to the frame where they lifted you from. You feel mangled – yes, that’s exactly the phrase: to mangle. What sort of laboratory is this anyway?

You might not be able to distinguish a fault line while standing on one. Other places, however, might retain obvious transitory features, forming a mental vacuum, invisibly charged, brimming with history, its existence unregistered by the senses or other, more objective means. Out there, nature slowly covers up remnants, both destroying and retaining.

“Yes,” said the young man eagerly, when he was acknowledged. “I was wondering – after this lecture in which, if I may be so free, you criticise everything – whether there is anything, any artists, works, books, that you do admire?”

This for Howard was the most difficult question conceivable. He was on his own here and adopted an innocent grin. Why hadn’t he prepared for this? His audience suddenly regarded him with sincere interest and some even held their pens at the ready. He experienced that strange sensation again: here he was the cynic who excelled in inflammatory speeches always directed against something, who could only discuss such matters in a negative light, and yet his audience appeared so interested in his taste. As if someone who could express his aversion to things so perfectly, would also be able to talk about what he loved so infectiously. He himself doubted whether he loved anything at all.

Because his silence had began to exceed the limits of the customary pause for thought, the young man sat up straight in his chair as if giving weight to what, after all, had been a perfectly legitimate question.

“Because, if you yourself create a work, I mean, you are a visual artist aren’t you? - then it must be difficult - to my way of thinking - not having a positive force to motivate you. Something to enthuse about.”

Howard tapped the edge of the lectern with the stick, the stick containing the rolled-up images which, according to him, were indeed nothing less than ashes...

If you desire, you may enter some of the houses. The space to move around extends as far as several storeys. You will not discover sanitation. Some houses don’t even possess a front door. You can only view these from the outside, but the absence of an entrance can’t keep you from imagining the interior.

Somewhere in the city you own a garage where you can store fancy cars and motorbikes. One way or another, it is never very difficult to rediscover the accessible houses or the garage. If you wait long enough, you’ll come across it again as a matter of course. You are, it seems, fated to discover important and pleasant spots, for they are located along exactly the route that is an obvious part of an ever more familiar circumference.

The various neighbourhoods have each got a certain identity. There are palm trees in the streets, lampposts, traffic lights. Waiting for these to turn green would however be absurd. In this respect, it’s a cardboard world: details appear to make sense, but don’t.

At times, we see each other driving among the rest of the traffic. We are not allowed to adopt a speed slower than the maximum and do not at all feel the need to.We are in this city to kill each other. The opportunities to harm one another are limitless. Here, death is painless, instantly followed by a flash of light at your character’s spawnpoint, a flash which implies your reincarnation.

“It’s a shame you can’t be here”, was the first thing I said.

“I am trying to visualize it from here. I was hoping you’d be able to feed me a few details”, he said cheerfully.

To visualize something. I was instantly reminded of his last article, which was coincidentally about this same subject. My father contended that “to visualize something” actually means to place yourself in the role that you would have had in the situation you are trying to visualize; not just a simple, cerebral visualization or projection, but an actual “being present” or role play, acting if you will, with the only limitation that you cannot be physically present. With age comes the skill to keep this to oneself; the subtle act of inner visualization.

I didn’t dare to tell my father that this conversation, during which he was making a visualization of my situation, was a perfect opportunity to test out his assertion. Was he really acting as if he was with me, inside himself? After we had spoken, would he no longer have the need to come? If he only knew how much his presence would have meant to me, whether it was mental or physical.

• Nederlands


• Texts
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• Gwenneth Boelens
• Endless Lowlands
• Roma Publications