Time Ages in a Hurry (11 page)

He asked me what I thought about it. It wasn’t easy finding the words, it was late, tiredness weighed on me, I’d have liked to go to sleep, I was staring at the lights of the gulf, a damp breeze had risen up, the usual three or four night owls lingered on the hotel’s terrace, it was hard to follow what he was saying, even more so in a language foreign to us both. Now and then he’d pause to search for the right word and in those lapses my attention wandered even more, a country under surveillance, he hoped I’d understand, sure I understood, I understood perfectly, even if to really understand things, you needed to experience them firsthand, yet I knew very well that in those years his was a country under surveillance, or to be more precise, it was a police state. Exactly, he said, a police state, and I was a poor state employee, because everything was the state’s, do you get it? Do you want to know why in the bio I gave to the festival jury under “profession” I wrote “lawyer,” it’s simple, because that was my profession, I was a state lawyer, on behalf of the state I defended people the state wanted to convict, I don’t know
if you understand what a vicious circle this was, that was the function of my profession, to accept this vicious circle, I was the dog who bites his own tail, no, I was the tail the dog bit. And then he added: what if we get something to drink? An excellent idea indeed, I agreed, for me maybe a tisane, the violent images from the last movie we’d had to sit through that day lingered in Technicolor on my tired retinas. Violence in Technicolor, he went on, in our country on the other hand violence was gray, not even black and white but gray, and I had to adapt to that gray, because I was the gray functionary of a state that, in order to make other countries believe democracy belonged to the people, provided the accused with a public defender like in a real democracy, yet the accused I dealt with hadn’t committed thefts, frauds, homicides, or any other crimes appearing in the penal code, they’d committed the crime of thinking differently from how the state thought, and they’d expressed their thoughts in public, or in private, perhaps because they’d talked about it with a cousin, or a brother-in-law, and those people had reported it to the state police. He paused, and meanwhile the waiter had arrived with our orders, but I’d changed my mind, I preferred a coffee, an Italian espresso, there are occasions, rare occasions, when you must be wide awake, I thought of the Italian proverb, the sleeping man won’t catch the fish, and asked him if he knew the saying, perhaps there was a similar version in his country, and he clearly did, if you don’t sleep tonight, you’ll catch a strange fish, he said smiling, a dog with a bitten tail, better make a joke of it, that way I won’t turn too dramatic, I’ll tell you about a dog whose tail was bitten.

The breeze had died down suddenly, leaving a clear night, on the promenade a small group passed singing “Cielito lindo,” in the morning we’d watched a Mexican movie, it wouldn’t win, the director and actors knew it, it was a simple and heartfelt movie, the kind that doesn’t win awards in important festivals, maybe some refined critic will talk about it. They’ve understood and are playing along, I said. Back then I too was playing along in some way, he said, but you play along even if it’s rigged, because you hope one day to draw the winning card, this is the perversity of the vicious circle, it’s like Achilles and the turtle, on paper the turtle wins the race, the logic is tight, but the truth is that Achilles is Achilles and you are the turtle, forgive me the zoological digressions, I’ve moved on from dogs to turtles, and the thing is that at the trial we’d begin from the same point, and the turtle in theory could arrive before Achilles, and the finish line would be the acquittal of the accused, but that finish line would never arrive for the turtle, my run consisted in trudging painfully after the fleet-footed one so he wouldn’t cross the line too many meters ahead of me, the race was his anyway, let’s say I had to be satisfied with centimeters, I was working with centimeters, I don’t know if I’m being clear, I’ll put it in an equation: one centimeter, one year less in a labor camp, two centimeters, two years less, and so on, sometimes you had to be satisfied even with millimeters, I’d try to nibble away at a few millimeters, two or three months less in jail can mean a great deal to a man, for example: my defendant had absolutely no intention of undermining state security, it’s true the books found in his apartment were published in France, though I did point out to
this venerable court that they’re about the French Revolution, which, as we know, put an end to absolute monarchy: things of this kind, and the prosecuting attorney never did voice any objection, or interrogate, or question, anyway the race had already been won from the start, the sentence was already set, the judges needed only a few minutes in a fake meeting in the council chamber to read a slip of paper they already had in their pockets, yet how solemn they were as they listened to my closing address, my speeches asking for clemency or claiming the right to think, depending on which millimeters I was nibbling away at, at the moment.

He made a sweeping with his hand as if to say enough, picked up his cigarettes and lighter from the table, put a banknote on the bill plate. I don’t want to bother you further, he said in a low voice, you’re tired, and this is a stale story. And at that point, I did something inappropriate, too intimate for our having just met, I stopped him, gripping his arm. We can’t let this story be swallowed by the night, I said, please. I was losing myself in all the details, he said, sorry, I’ll try to be more concise, besides, this old story is simple in the end, or at least it seems simple when looking at it now and the details only weaken it, the thing is that on a certain day, a decisive day, I didn’t have any more millimeters to nibble at, absolutely zero, I was stuck at the starting line, I could have claimed my defendant was unfit to plead but even this was untenable, it wasn’t a proper mitigating circumstance for a talented journalist who everyone knew had never dissented from the regime, but how was it possible, a man like him not responsible for his own actions?
They’d have laughed in my face. The case was this: my defendant had leaked some things to a German weekly, documents about the regime’s repression, he had a mole at the Ministry of the Interior and had prepared everything carefully, he’d asked for a passport to go to Frankfurt to do a piece on West German decadence, imagine that, he was supposed to cross the border on January tenth and on the twelfth, a Saturday, the weekly was supposed to publish the photocopies of the documents in a story signed under a pseudonym, which in fact was him. I don’t know what happened, the weekly had the copies for a while and perhaps feared they’d go stale, your press is always afraid news will get old, the inevitable never happens and the unexpected always does, someone wrote, and the unexpected had been this, a banal fact of advance disclosure, this was the turtle’s situation, it wasn’t a matter of nibbling away at millimeters anymore, maybe I could get him into a psychiatric prison, a bit better than labor camp, because the intellectuals who ended up there toiled less and were treated with more respect, but from a moral point of view it was even worse, when I rose for my closing statement I felt I was neither a dog nor a turtle, I really felt like a worm, headed right down the biological ladder, but as I was saying before, the inevitable never happens, the unexpected always does. And the unexpected was that the door to the courtroom swung open, an usher entered followed by a man who approached the bar, he was a tall man, with a few gray strands in his hair, I thought he was a bailiff, he was holding a piece of paper, which he showed to the judges, those magistrates read it in turn and began chattering amongst themselves,
the president of the tribunal beckoned the bailiff, he went to the back of the courtroom and let in a young guy with a camera and a microphone, this kid placed the microphone in the middle of the room, then opened a tripod and put a camera on it that faced the bench and would film me and the defendant from the back, the president nodded for me to rise, it was my turn, the robes on my shoulders felt heavy and all of a sudden I felt excessively hot in that courtroom where it was freezing, I was defending a really difficult case and I gave my speech with conviction even though it would amount to nothing, as I told you, they used to stay only a few minutes in the council chamber, the judges in that democracy were in a hurry to get home, especially in winter, when the Warsaw roads are full of icy snow and it’s better to return before nightfall. But this time they were late in reentering, and the minutes passed. There was a silence in that room, you can’t imagine it, to say the silence of a tomb is a cliché, but I can’t find other words, rather, to pay homage to a writer from the country where we find ourselves now, I’d say there was a netherworldly silence. Finally the court came back, yet before reading the verdict the president took care to say that to err is human, to persist is diabolical, and the court was sure the defendant wouldn’t persist, he was a person too highly esteemed by the government and by the people to persist in his error, and this was the verdict, the atonement expected from him was a public admission of his error, possibly in the Party newspaper, which would offer him its generous hospitality. Even though they’d found a cunning way out, because as with the Stalin-era trials, they’d wanted him to plead guilty himself,
they still hadn’t convicted him, they hadn’t had the courage to convict him, and this was really unusual in those times, in my country. I congratulated my defendant, whose face wore an incredulous expression, I wanted to hurry out of the room to find out who that elegant man was, the illusionist who’d enchanted the wild beasts, the audience, who’d changed the circus act right before their eyes. He hadn’t found anything strange in this, sometimes artists are like that, I’d never met that filmmaker before, I knew him only by name, the reason for that sudden intrusion, this is what I wanted to know, but what a question, he hadn’t burst in at all, he was simply one of the film directors at the State Documentary Studios, a state institution, and he’d gotten the idea to make a documentary about the trials of citizens accused of activity against the state, and so he’d asked for official permission from the state, and the state obviously had conceded, because a state institution cannot refuse to let one of its own directors film trials concerning the state. Of course all the filmed material was sifted through by high-level functionaries of the state so as to be approved before editing, he was sure he’d never get approval but that was beside the point, because the important thing was to film reality, and those functionaries would have to put reality in the archives, they couldn’t throw it out, and I knew as he did that functionaries of the state, in this case the judges, didn’t like to be judged by other functionaries of the state, because ours was a state founded on mutual respect, the only cohesive element that kept it on its feet: so there, the goal was this, to film our present time in order to leave it in the archives, was I satisfied? And at that point I
asked him if he could give me his address, it was better to avoid the phone, I’d have liked to talk to him, I was a film buff. But I didn’t go to see him right away, actually I didn’t care that much about cinema, I went when the right moment arrived, I’ll be brief, otherwise I’ll end up with a screenplay, it was at the end of winter, he received me in his apartment, a sober place, only books and posters, in those days we were all poor. I told him I had another case to propose for his documentary, an even more difficult trial than the first one, something worth keeping in the archives, because this time the accused wasn’t even a person, it was a play, a tragedy or comedy I’m not really sure, he could call it what he liked, it was a theater piece, a performance basically without a script, almost no words were uttered, they talked with their bodies, there was a director, it’s true, yet with a play there are actors who interpret it, a music director, a lighting director, a stage designer, it was impossible to take all these people to court, in short, not even a word against the ideals of the state; the accused, if you can put it like that, was how the play was staged, that was considered subversive, but even the accusation was unclear, how can you charge the staging of a play? Come and film a case against fiction, I told him, a case against pure fiction. He came, and filmed the reading of the indictment by the prosecuting attorney, a reading that proved to be so grotesque that even the prosecutor realized it and at a certain point began wavering, the court didn’t have to retire to the council chamber, the president of the court objected that the charge had no legal substance and the play could be done. Then months passed by, maybe a year when I didn’t
need to go see him. Then came the day I had to go ring his doorbell once again. But this time it wasn’t a matter of a play, it was about reality, about a man’s life, I said it like that, because this man’s possible punishment might just bury him alive. I explained the case to him, and he listened carefully. What a shame, he said, he’d be glad to come, but unfortunately at the moment his documentary was on hold, the Institute of Cinema had used up all the celluloid, he’d made a request for it to the relevant authorities more than a month earlier and they still hadn’t arranged to resupply him, I knew more than he did about bureaucratic delays, perhaps the celluloid would get to him by the end of the summer. I acted on impulse, didn’t even have time to think about what I was saying, Director, I said: come without the celluloid.

He paused. Lit a cigarette, hesitating like someone who fears he isn’t believed. So that’s how my trials were filmed from that point on, he continued, with the camera empty, and the sentences were always quite lenient. Of that short documentary, not even a half hour long, which he’d actually filmed and which remains buried in the archives of a defunct state, all the rest – at least a couple more hours of filming, I mean all the images filmed without celluloid – is the most moving, but those images live only in the archive of my memory and at a certain point it almost seemed to me I was seeing them projected on the screen of this clear night in May. He stopped talking, and I was to understand he had nothing else to add, raised his glass in a toast to something only he knew, and then said: now you get why I didn’t put screenwriter down in my bio, but this isn’t important, the funniest thing in this whole
story is the line I used to convince him to come and film without celluloid: Director, we’re dealing with reality here, not film. Just think a moment about that bit of nonsense: we’re dealing with reality here, not film. Now that he’s no longer with us and this festival is showing a retrospective of all his movies, except the most important one, the one that’s not on celluloid, a desire has come over me and I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or regret: I wish that through some sorcery he’d pop out of the night, if only for an instant, to laugh with me at that line of mine.