Selected Essays of John Berger (67 page)

‘And have their relative strengths always been the same?’ I asked.

‘The sceptical self has become stronger,’ he said. ‘But there are other selves too.’ He smiled at me and took my arm and added, as though to reassure me: ‘Its hegemony is not complete!’

He said this a little breathlessly and in a slightly deeper voice than usual — in the voice in which he spoke when moved, for example when embracing a person he loved.

His walk was very characteristic. His hips moved stiffly, but otherwise he walked like a young man, quickly, lightly, to the rhythm of his own reflections. ‘The present book,’ he said, ‘is written in a consistent style — detached, reasoning, cool.’

‘Because it comes later?’

‘No, because it is not really about myself. It is about an historical period. The first volume is also about myself and I could not have told the truth if I had written it all in the same voice. There was no self which was above the struggle of the others and could have told the story evenly. The categories we make between different aspects of experience — so that, for instance, some people say I should not have spoken about love
and
about the Comintern in the same book — these categories are mostly there for the convenience of liars.’

‘Does one self hide its decisions from the others?’

Maybe he didn’t hear the question. Maybe he wanted to say what he said whatever the question.

‘My first decision,’ he said, ‘was not to die. I decided when I was a child, in a sick-bed, with death at hand, that I wanted to live.’

From the
pension
we drove down to Graz. Lou and Anya needed to do some shopping; Ernst and I installed ourselves in the lounge of an old hotel by the river. It was in this hotel that I had come to see Ernst on my way to Prague in the summer of ’68. He had given me addresses, advice, information, and summarized for me the historical background to the new events taking place. Our interpretation of these events was not exactly the same, but it seems pointless now to try to define our small differences. Not because Ernst is dead, but because those events were buried alive and we see only their large contours heaped beneath the earth. Our specific points of difference no longer exist because the choices to which they applied no longer exist. Nor will they ever exist again in quite the same way. Opportunities can be irretrievably lost and then their loss is like a death.
When the Russian tanks entered Prague in August 1968 Ernst was absolutely lucid about that death.

In the lounge of the hotel I remembered the occasion of four years before. He had already been worried. Unlike many Czechs, he considered it quite likely that Brezhnev would order the Red Army to move in. But he still hoped. And this hope still carried within it all the other hopes which had been born in Prague that spring.

After 1968 Ernst began to concentrate his thoughts on the past. But he remained incorrigibly orientated towards the future. His view of the past was for the benefit of the future — for the benefit of the great or terrible transformations it held in store. But after ’68 he recognized that the path towards any revolutionary transformation was bound to be long and tortuous and that Socialism in Europe would be deferred beyond his life-span. Hence the best use of his remaining time was to bear witness to the past.

We did not talk about this in the hotel, for there was nothing new to decide. The important thing was to finish the second volume of his memoirs and that very morning we had found a way of making this happen more quickly. Instead, we talked of love: or, more exactly, about the state of being in love. Our talk followed roughly these lines.

The capacity to fall in love is now thought of as natural and universal — and as a passive capacity. (Love strikes. Love-struck.) Yet there have been whole periods when the possibility of falling in love did not exist. Being in love in fact depends upon the possibility of free active choice — or anyway an apparent possibility. What does the lover choose? He chooses to stake the world (the whole of his life) against the beloved. The beloved concentrates all the possibilities of the world within her and thus offers the realization of all his own potentialities. The beloved for the lover empties the world of hope (the world that does not include her). Strictly speaking, being in love is a mood in so far as it is infinitely extensive — it reaches beyond the stars; but it cannot develop without changing its nature, and so it cannot endure.

The equivalence between the beloved and the world is confirmed by sex. To make love with the beloved is, subjectively, to possess and be possessed by the world. Ideally, what remains outside the experience is — nothing. Death of course is within it.

This provokes the imagination to its very depths. One wants to use the world in the act of love. One wants to make love with fish, with fruit, with hills, with forests, in the sea.

And those, said Ernst, ‘are the metamorphoses! It is nearly always that way round in Ovid. The beloved becomes a tree, a stream, a hill. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
are not poetic conceits, they are really about the relation between the world and the poet in love.’

I looked into his eyes. They were pale. (Invariably they were moist with
the strain of seeing.) They were pale like some blue flower bleached to a whitish grey by the sun. Yet despite their moisture and their paleness, the light which had bleached them was still reflected in them.

‘The passion of my life,’ he said, ‘was Lou. I had many love affairs. Some of them, when I was a student here in Graz, in this hotel. I was married. With all the other women I loved there was a debate, a discourse about our different interests. With Lou there is no discourse because our interests are the same. I don’t mean we never argue. She argued for Trotsky when I was still a Stalinist. But our interest — below all our interests — is singular. When I first met her, I said No. I remember the evening very well. I knew immediately I saw her, and I said No to myself. I knew that if I had a love affair with her, everything would stop. I would never love another woman. I would live monogamously. I thought I would not be able to work. We would do nothing except make love over and over again. The world would never be the same. She knew too. Before going home to Berlin she asked me very calmly: “Do you want me to stay?” “No,” I said.’

Lou came back from the shops with some cheeses and yoghurts she had bought.

‘Today we have talked for hours about me,’ said Ernst, ‘you don’t talk about yourself. Tomorrow we shall talk about you.’

On the way out of Graz I stopped at a bookshop to find Ernst a copy of some poems by the Serbian poet Miodrag Pavlovic. Ernst had said sometime during the afternoon that he no longer wrote poems and no longer saw the purpose of poetry. ‘It may be,’ he added, ‘that my idea of poetry is outdated.’ I wanted him to read Pavlovic’s poems. I gave him the book in the car. ‘I already have it,’ he said. But he put his hand on my shoulders. For the last time without suffering.

We were going to have supper in the café in the village. On the stairs outside his room, Ernst, who was behind me, suddenly but softly cried out. I turned round immediately. He had both his hands pressed to the small of his back. ‘Sit down,’ I said, ‘lie down.’ He took no notice. He was looking past me into the distance. His attention was there, not here. At the time I thought this was because the pain was bad. But it seemed to pass quite quickly. He descended the stairs — no more slowly than usual. The three sisters were waiting at the front door to wish us good night. We stopped a moment to talk. Ernst explained that his rheumatism had jabbed him in the back.

There was a curious distance about him. Either he consciously suspected what had happened, or else the chamois in him, the animal that was so strong in him, had already left to look for a secluded place in which to die. I question whether I am now using hindsight. I am not. He was already distant.

We walked, chatting, through the garden past the sounds of water. Ernst opened the gate and fastened it because it was difficult, for the last time.

We sat at our usual table in the public bar of the café. Some people were having their evening drink. They went out. The landlord, a man only interested in stalking and shooting deer, switched off two of the lights and went out to fetch our soup. Lou was furious and shouted after him. He didn’t hear. She got up, went behind the bar and switched on the two lights again. ‘I would have done the same,’ I said. Ernst smiled at Lou and then at Anya and me. ‘If you and Lou lived together,’ he said, ‘it would be explosive.’

When the next course came Ernst was unable to eat it. The landlord came up to enquire whether it was not good. ‘It is excellently prepared,’ said Ernst, holding up the untouched plate of food in front of him, ‘and excellently cooked, but I am afraid that I cannot eat it.’

He looked pale and he said he had pains in the lower part of his stomach.

‘Let us go back,’ I said. Again he appeared — in response to the suggestion — to look into the distance. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘in a little while.’

We finished eating. He was unsteady on his feet but he insisted on standing alone. On the way to the door he placed his hand on my shoulder — as he had in the car. But it expressed something very different. And the touch of his hand was now even lighter.

After we had driven a few hundred metres he said: ‘I think I may be going to faint.’ I stopped and put my arm round him. His head fell on my shoulder. He was breathing in short gasps. With his left, sceptical eye he looked hard up into my face. A sceptical, questioning, unswerving look. Then his look became unseeing. The light which had bleached his eyes was no longer in them. He was breathing heavily.

Anya flagged down a passing car and went back to the village to fetch help. She came back in another car. When she opened the door of our car, Ernst tried to move his feet out. It was his last instinctive movement — to be ordered, willed, neat.

When we reached the house, the news had preceded us and the gates, which were difficult, were already open so that we could drive up to the front door. The young man who had brought Anya from the village carried Ernst indoors and upstairs over his shoulders. I walked behind to stop his head banging against the door-jambs. We laid him down on his bed. We did helpless things to occupy ourselves whilst waiting for the doctor. But even waiting for the doctor was a pretext. There was nothing to do. We massaged his feet, we fetched a hot-water bottle, we felt his pulse. I stroked his cold head. His brown hands on the white sheet, curled up but not grasping, looked quite separate from the rest of the body. They appeared cut off by his cuffs. Like the forefeet cut off from an animal found dead in the forest.

The doctor arrived. A man of fifty. Tired, pale-faced, sweating. He wore a peasant’s suit without a tie. He was like a veterinary surgeon. ‘Hold his arm,’ he said, ‘whilst I give this injection.’ He inserted the needle finely in the vein so that the liquid should flow along it like the water along the barrel-pipe in the garden. At this moment we were alone in the room together. The doctor shook his head. ‘How old is he?’ ‘Seventy-three.’ ‘He looks older,’ he said.

‘He looked younger when he was alive,’ I said.

‘Has he had an infarctus before?’

‘Yes.’

‘He has no chance this time,’ he said.

Lou, Anya, the three sisters and I stood around his bed. He had gone.

Besides painting scenes from everyday life on the walls of their tombs, the Etruscans carved on the lids of their sarcophagi full-length figures representing the dead. Usually these figures are half-reclining, raised on one elbow, feet and legs relaxed as though on a couch, but head and neck alert as they gaze into the distance. Many thousands of such carvings were executed quickly and more or less according to a formula. But however stereotyped the rest of these figures, their alertness as they look into the distance is striking. Given the context, the distance is surely a temporal rather than a spatial one: the distance is the future the dead projected when alive. They look into that distance as though they could stretch out a hand and touch it.

I can make no sarcophagus carving. But there are pages written by Ernst Fischer where it seems to me that the writer wrote adopting an equivalent stance, achieving a similar quality of expectation.

1974

François was killed on a Saturday night. Just as it was getting dark. A car coming from behind knocked him over. The young driver of the car, who didn’t stop, was fortunate because the autopsy showed that François was drunk. Even before the result of the autopsy, nobody in the village imagined anything different. If it was Saturday night and François wasn’t at the farm, he was on one of his weekend walks and drunk. But usually, when very drunk, he was still attentive and careful about traffic.

He was seventy-six. He owned what he was wearing, a few clothes he had left in the stable, a mouth-organ and the money which the police found tied into a plastic bag that he carried on a cord round his neck.

Owning so little, what gave him pleasure? The mountains, women, music and red wine. This makes him sound like a bohemian — he who, even in his extravagant boasts and jokes, never left the valley of two adjacent rivers.

Why have I put off for so long trying to describe and remember your funeral? Because after it, you were not for once in the café telling a story about the late departed? Because I’m waiting for next summer when your absence will become more acute?

A knock on the door with your stick, and you walk in without waiting for an answer. Your creased face folded yet again into a smile. You give a long kiss to B. A smile of relish. Then through the door into the next room — as though it were beyond human ingenuity to invent a right that you wouldn’t have in this mountain chalet where you once came to be congratulated on still being alive.

‘There’s a man with the same name as me who has just died over there!’ You pointed across the valley to the second river far below. ‘There were those who thought it was me, me who was dead! Me!’