They walk through the city. They stop to buy a pineapple. They stop again outside a café bar that has not opened yet. The shutters are down. There is a father and a small girl outside. The child is sitting on the wooden bench holding on to a scooter, swinging her legs. Behind her there is a large image spray-painted onto the grey shutters, of a female astronaut in a space suit. The child is wearing a helmet and the astronaut is wearing a helmet. The astronaut has cartoon features and bandages on her face, a criss-cross of plasters on her left cheekbone, another single beige strip on the visor of her helmet and a further one on her right cheek. She looks slightly bashed up, as though she’s been through a rough journey and has returned to earth with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and the upper lip curled in an expression of ironic resilience. Beautiful and absurd, a character from a graphic novel, with large eyes and drooping lids. She is indestructible, as though she’s been out all night in the clubs, ready and up for more. She could take a lot worse and still come out alive. A white speech bubble emerging in a zigzag from her mouth says – it’s my cosmos bitch!
The day is bright and sunny, but also a little cold. Autumn has begun to grip the streets and the air is motionless. Lena tells Armin that she loves nothing more than a good crunchy leaf to step on. It’s just the most satisfying thing on earth, she says, don’t you think?
As they continue walking, it seems to me that a curfew is about to fall across the city. Time is running out and it will soon be winter in these streets. Soon they will be taking in the outdoor furniture. We will feel it in our pages, that flinching against time. The words will stiffen and retreat into a big sleep from which we might never wake up. As though we’re about to be overwhelmed by some great weather event, some world phenomenon, some part of history rising in the streets like something that has never happened before. We come to a place where workers have dug up the street and left a pile of sand at the side of a pit. The pit has been fenced off with planks of wood. The sand makes it look like the workers are at the seaside. Somewhere in the distant past the city must have been underwater. Like a city on loan from the sea. A place where people carry subliminal thoughts of the sea coming back to reclaim the streets.
They pass by a woman sitting in a car putting on her make-up, leaning forward towards the mirror as she applies the lipstick. They pass by a woman standing on the street with her dog on a lead, holding a small yellow sack containing dogshit in her fingers. They pass by a woman sweeping leaves with a wide brush. The brush looks new, with a wooden handle and bright-red bristles. The sweeping woman is joined by other street-sweepers, one of them with a wide rake, all gathering the leaves into one large mound, and then it’s Armin who is the first to speak into that silent walking.
Sometimes the brush shoots, he says.
What?
Lena laughs.
It’s a German expression, he says. My mother said it from time to time. I suppose it comes from children using the household brush to pretend it’s a gun. You know, building a barricade of chairs in the kitchen and hunching down to defend their territory. It’s usually said as a warning, I think. Like, harmless things don’t stay harmless. If you pretend something is a weapon, sooner or later it might turn out to be one. Or maybe, if you imagine something bad, who knows, it might become what you imagined.
Shoot the brush, Lena says.
I’m not joking, Armin says. I’ve heard my boss say it recently. One of our colleagues was talking about his wife meeting her former husband for a drink, just to chat about the children from that earlier marriage. The boss told him to watch out, sometimes the brush shoots, but the man whose wife was meeting her former husband said – don’t worry, it’s me who’s holding the brush.
They come to a bridge and Armin leans over the wall to look at the water below. There are people sitting on benches along the bank, some still wearing light clothing in the sun, holding on to the summer. A child throwing stones into the water. Lena wonders if they should get on one of the boats and go up to the lake. She speaks as though this might be the last opportunity available. Like the world is full of shrinking possibilities, it’s their obligation to get the most out of it before everything turns into memory.
You could walk there faster, Armin says.
When they get to Lena’s studio, she takes me out of her bag and lies down on the bed. Behind her, over the bed, there is a skylight through which the light of the afternoon comes flooding down around her. She examines the map and wonders, as Armin walks around the room – is there something buried there, what do you think? Armin comes to lie on the bed beside her to have a look.
I am happy for them.
The room returns to stillness. As if they’re waiting for the red glow of the sun to fade and darkness to fall, before they can resume their lives. He tells her that he’s got to get a few things done before he goes on tour with his sister.
I need to get a new X-ray, Armin says.
What for?
They won’t let me travel without a certificate. The shrapnel, he says. Sets off alarms at the airport.
Armin tells her about a man he met some time ago who was turned back in mid-air with metal pins in his leg. He’s from Nigeria, he says. He had a gunshot wound in his knee and managed to make his way to Ireland, where he was operated on at one of the main hospitals. Then he found himself being deported back to Nigeria because he was unable to produce any evidence of persecution other than his injuries. A human rights lawyer took up his defence and argued in court that they had no right to deport him because the bolts and screws in his knee were the property of the hospital. Quite apart from their indifference to the man’s uncertain future, the lawyer said, the immigration officials were, in fact, committing an act of larceny by exporting hospital property without consent. On top of that, there appeared to be no medical experts in Nigeria qualified to remove the complex metal structures from his leg, so the man would have suffered for the rest of his life in terrible agony.
The judge rejected the plea and the deportation officers came to collect the man while he was still on crutches. An officer boarded the flight with him, that’s the way it works, Armin says, the deported individual has to be delivered into the hands of the police in the country to which he is being returned. In any case, Armin says, the Frontex flight was turned back over Algerian airspace. The immigration officials in Ireland were there to welcome him back just a couple of hours after he left. They had to wait for an appointment at the hospital before the bolts could be removed and he could be deported successfully.
In the end, Armin says, his lawyer in Dublin pursued a case against the state on his behalf and managed to have him brought back from Nigeria. He’s living in Ireland now. Eventually they gave him citizenship.
Through the skylight it is possible to see the clock tower, lit up as the evening light fades. The clock has a black face and gold-painted hands, no numerals. Armin stands up to look out and see what the time is.
Let’s go and eat something, he says.
The X-ray, Lena says. Could I have a copy of it?
What for?
Do you think they might give us a copy?
We can ask, he says.
It’s your body. You’re the patient, you have a right to demand it.
It belongs to the hospital, Armin says. Like the bolts and screws in my friend’s legs. My body is my copyright, but the radiology image is their property.
We’ll have to steal it, Lena says.
Why?
My art, she says.
You want to use it?
If that’s OK with you, Armin. I want it for my work. A life-size image is what I have in mind. Your X-ray will be the focal point, with all that shrapnel, jagged and black inside. The story of a man reconstructed from several locations.
Cool, Armin says.
Are you sure it’s OK with you?
Absolutely, he says. I’m with you all the way. You distract them and I’ll download a copy.
He laughs – don’t worry, they’ll give me the file.
Lena kisses him. They go out for something to eat and I hear the door closing after them. The room is silent. The city has come to life with the sounds of night and there is a yellow glow coming in through the skylight across the floor. The clock tower chimes. I have been left behind on a broad desk along with the pineapple and a small stack of books.
At the bottom of the pile, there is a book by a Russian journalist who was murdered for telling the truth. Her life had been in danger for some time and she had been subjected to many acts of intimidation and violence, even poisoned, even once put through a simulated execution when they brought her out on a pitch-black night and fired a rocket launcher directly over her head. All because of her reporting on the war in Chechnya. Despite those threats, she continued searching for the truth, bringing the facts to light in her articles for a free Moscow newspaper. And because the truth could not be silenced in any other way, she was shot in the elevator of her apartment block one day. It happened to be Vladimir Putin’s birthday. She was shot four times by a man who got into the elevator with her. Twice in the chest, once in the shoulder and once more in the head at point-blank range. It is assumed that her killing was carried out on orders from the top, for her outspoken work on the Chechen War, for speaking the truth about Russia, for not giving up.
Her name is Anna Politkovskaya. The book is called A Small Corner of Hell.
Her first-hand account of the conditions during the Second Chechen War describes the country as a commercial concentration camp. Villages are locked down. Children become mute after bombings. The Feds, as the Russian troops are known, will not even let people out into the woods to collect wild garlic, their only source of vitamins. The inhabitants of these poor villages pay ransom fees to have their loved ones released from the pits in which they are kept by the military. People go around collecting money to save a neighbour from being killed. A woman is asked for fifty thousand dollars before a surgeon will agree to operate on her injured husband. His skull is an open wound. She has no money. She is forced to look for a friendly taxi driver who might bring him into Grozny. The capital is blockaded, nobody can move. Every morning women stand outside a detention centre to plead for their loved ones. Each one of them is given a price to pay for the release of her husband. If she doesn’t pay, the figure goes up, because the price of a corpse is higher in Chechnya than the price of a living person. She describes a group of women gathered around a table, sitting out the curfew through the night, listening to the sound of distant shelling.
The women at the table do not cry, although they would like to. You rarely hear crying in Grozny. They’ve all cried their eyes out long ago.
And the children’s hospital.
In the words of the head doctor, Ruslan Ganayev –
As soon as the blockade started, the parents grabbed their children and tried to make their way to the villages to hide from the shooting and the purges. They even took some kids from the resuscitation wards. They simply took out the tubes and carried them away. We had a girl with infantile cerebral paralysis in traction – they took her off it. The only patient we have left in the whole hospital now is a three-month-old, Salavat Khamikov from Alkhan-Kala.