For weeks I lay on the bedside table, silent and inconspicuous. Nothing more than a lifeless object in the room. I was quietly present at night while they lay stretched out, staring at the ceiling, getting their breath back. How can a book match the living? All a book can hope to do is imagine things in words that have once been true in life.
They are not long married – Lena Knecht and Michael Ostowar. Their wedding took place in Ireland. In a small hotel in Kilkenny, they held hands cutting the cake and smudged each other’s faces with a tiny dollop of chocolate as the bride and groom are sometimes expected to do. Their honeymoon kicked off on the west coast, where they stayed a few nights in a lighthouse on Clare Island, waking up to the waves crashing on the rocks below.
They have set up home in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. Lena is an artist and Michael works in cybersecurity. They talk about starting a family.
Let’s have a baby.
As if their lives, their happiness, their sense of belonging to the world, will always remain incomplete without some enduring family context going forward. A baby would give purpose to their emotions. It would turn the intensity of their joy into material evidence.
They’ve had all those ethical discussions about whether it’s right to have a baby at this time. What kind of world would they be sending their child into? What are things going to look like fifty years from now? They can be heard talking about the carrying capacity of the earth. They are fully aware – though he refuses to repeat it even as a joke – of the carbon footprint of a human child being compared to that of twenty-four new cars. They have read the book by Margaret Atwood and seen the TV series about the handmaids being confined as baby machines. They’re big fans of The Matrix. They love anything to do with space travel. Their favourite movie is called Annihilation, about a couple who need to fight through a translucent wall in order to find a way of getting back to each other again. They talk of having a child that might live for two hundred years, maybe longer, an eternal child that would never grow old.
A shout from the future.
On their honeymoon they went to visit art galleries in London and Madrid. It was Lena’s wish to stand in front of Picasso’s masterpiece – Guernica. At the Prado Museum they came across a disturbing painting of Adam and Eve prominently hanging in the main hall. It shows the Garden of Eden with the serpent in the apple tree turning into a smiling baby. What a thought! A human snake-child bringing an end to paradise. Neither of them would have much time for faith-based narratives. To Lena, these biblical tales are no more than a grain of truth turned into art. But she saw in this painting at the Prado some kind of premonition, as though they had been found out. The snake-child was calling time. It’s a cruel fact of life that ecstasy can only exist in the moment it comes to an end. Standing side by side, looking at the snake with the face of an infant grinning at them, they experienced those acute expulsion fears that all lovers go through. There was nothing they could do but talk about having a baby of their own. They would love it to bits and turn themselves into the most devoted parents.
Whenever these conversations take place, she tells Mike he will make a wonderful dad. She wants their baby to be a boy, just like him. But first, she needs to be herself. Her instinct as an artist is to convert everything into a visual story. The presence of a child right now might distract her from that goal.
He fears that her creative pursuits might take away those maternal instincts. He usually rounds off the argument by saying, with a touch of irony – if you want to save the planet, Lena, if that’s your main concern, to make a contribution to this earth, then you better get pregnant right now, don’t waste another minute, because our baby is going to be the next Einstein, or the next Rosalind Franklin, it’s going to be so cute and so clever, it will fix everything.
To which Lena replies with a laugh, tapping her belly – let’s wait a bit. All right with you there, Einstein?
One night, while they lay uncovered on the bed, she became aware of me on the bedside table.
The book, she said, as though there was somebody else in the room. It made her self-conscious, seeing me right beside her like a human presence listening in. An intruder. A watcher. The snake-child.
She picked me up and looked at the image of the shadow man on the cover with his crutch raised in the air. Pulling the duvet around her legs, she sat up and ran the flat of her hand over my face. She read out the title printed in Gothic font, more like handwriting. Die Rebellion – Joseph Roth. The edges scuffed and worn. Faint thumbprints left behind by readers long disappeared from the world. She was unable to read the text of the book in German, but she had already managed to find a translation in the library and read the story of the barrel organ player in English. As she began leafing through the pages, she came across the speck of a mosquito printed like a capital letter in a top right-hand corner. A summer’s day begging to be remembered. The scribbled annotations in the margins made no sense to her. She was more intrigued by the hand-drawn map at the back and allowed her finger to cross the landscape as though she’d entered a fairy tale.
Look, she said, this must be a forest of pine trees. She pointed to a wooden shrine with a pitched roof to shelter the icon from the weather. She found an oak tree and a bench. And here, she wondered – is that a monument of some sort. A sundial, maybe?
Mike became a little irritated by the fact that her mind was elsewhere now, as if a book could have the power to come between them.
There’s something in it, she said.
As she continued studying the map, she was aware of the duty imposed on her by her father. She made up her mind, there and then, to go to Berlin. She had an uncle living in Germany, in the city of Magdeburg. Her father’s brother. He might be in a position to shed some light on that map.
Mike didn’t like the idea of her going. His protest came in the form of praise, reminding her how well her career was going. New York was the place for a young artist like her. It was a mistake to move out of that circle. She told him she needed new energy, new raw materials. This would give her a vision to follow – the life story of a book.
I’ll miss you, Mike said.
In artistic terms, Lena Knecht would describe herself as a thief. Her work makes use of images selected at random from other media. She has been inspired by the famous final frame of a Truffaut film in which a boy runs away from a detention centre. When he reaches the sea and turns around, his static face in that long final shot captures an entire life, all his optimism and all his pain. She looks for those lived expressions online. Her breakout came with a collection called Misfortune – a series of images sampled from minor domestic calamities posted on YouTube. Funny scenes of dogs running into doors, people falling off bikes, children crashing into each other. She picks out the expressions of surprise. By slowing these private moments down into stationary images, she removes the comic element, creating something that is both endearing and grotesque at the same time, what some art commentators have described as the inner despair of a world laughing at its own misfortune.
On the day before her flight to Berlin, she managed to find time to visit MoMA. She stood before a painting by Rothko as if she needed to say goodbye. When they say a piece of art speaks to you, it is understood that some visual energy has been transferred from the work to the viewer. And in reverse, a tiny part of the viewer is transposed into the painting. That Rothko painting must have soaked up a million hearts by now. Just as I have accumulated the inner lives of my readers. Their thoughts have been added in layers underneath the text, turning me into a living thing, with human faculties. I have the ability to remember. I can tell when history is in danger of repeating itself.