Читать книгу Vienna - Nick S. Thomas - Страница 11

They were already inside the building, and standing uncertainly behind the rows of chairs arranged in front of a television screen, when Mickey said;

“Oh Pet, we are a couple of fools. It’s all in German.”

The exhibition was not crowded. A young couple with twin toddlers sat in the third row, arms folded, attending to the video lecture with an air of sullen duty. Isolated twos and threes of people could be heard shuffling through the labyrinth of boards and curtains to the left. The place had the time-marking feel of a Thursday matinee. Elspeth looked up, and gave her husband a sheepish smile.

“I guess we can just look,” she said.

“We’d better, now we’re here. What do you say we skip the video?”

The first section of exhibits was devoted to reconstructions of pre-war shop-fronts, all dark polished wood and hand-painted gothic lettering. One window contained a less than life-like dummy, dressed in the winter fashion of 1933/4. Was she a model of a Viennese woman, or of a Viennese dummy, of fifty years ago? In any case both she and her setting, of miscellaneous goods and posted advertisements, seemed unremarkable to Mickey, and quite unworthy of the time and wonderment Elspeth was devoting to them.

He felt himself becoming very bored. It was an automatic reaction that had been part of his make-up for many years, for as a boy he had always sensed in this sort of exhibition a history-without-tears subtext that directly threatened his natural academic advantage. It had been a point of honour to learn nothing from such a source. Even to his adult mind there was an oppressive pointlessness to this tacky celebration of what was, after all, rather recent history. There was not yet any shortage of living people who had been part of what was represented here, nor, as his father had said, of streets and shops that had changed less than those people. The exhibition was outside, in a city where reconstruction eclipsed innovation, where there was still very little even of the neon light with which some capitals had been ablaze for more than half a century. It occurred to him that there might, after all, be a novel twist to this dreary display of the unsurprising. For it was not the continuity of human life that was being stressed here, but rather the presentation of the past as a museum piece made it more alien than it really was, a static recreation that marked it firmly as part of an age that was dead. A point was being made, an axe loudly ground.

He moved on, overtaking Elspeth, to a display of magazine covers and handbills, interspersed with posters and over-enlarged photographs. He cursed himself mildly, as he had occasionally before, for choosing Greek instead of German at school, simply because the Classical language was harder and less popular. Then again, there was some entertainment in inferring sense from context. The leaflets bore the stamp of propaganda, with their bold headlines and short paragraphs, the naïve exhortation betrayed by frequent exclamation marks, the whole headed by complex emblems and mirthless cartoons. There was a hint of real history here, in the associations of pre-war dictatorship; yet even in this the impression of age was less enhanced than dominated by that of foreignness, for it was the provenance of the material, not its period, that was remote.

And there was nothing more foreign than a foreign past. No English cartoonist had ever given birth to such blackened grotesques as these symbolic caricatures of Italy, communism and Jewry, with the heavy brushed shadows more substantial than the leaden figures that cast them. Neither had any English magazine ever borne the clean, elongated lettering found here. For some reason a language packed with long words had not generated longer street signs or wider pages. Instead the streamlined type-faces that had replaced the gothic had embraced the false economy of upward growth, like skyscrapers on a booming island.

Mickey wandered on round the corner, glancing only very briefly at the photographs on the way. Scenes of street violence were timeless and universal, and portraits of politicians, whether ancient or modern, held no interest for him. But the next item on the tour, though still tainted with the breathless pride of the school project, was at least surprising.

It was a representation in hardboard of a building whose imposing size and structure were skilfully implied by the exaggerated proportions of its model. The conflict of curves and right angles seemed less to evoke the architecture than the science fiction of its period, involving a gratuitous waste of space. Through the bottom of the façade was cut an enormous low curved arch topped with a decorative keystone, its massive presence emphasized by the little doors and windows placed at noticeable distance from its sides, in response to the structural rectangles within. Another empty curve beyond one of the doorways suggested that the archway was one of a series, above whose tops the windows in groups of three, punctuated by the keystones, formed a straight line, while, rising directly above each keystone, a cubist totem pole, jutting from the wall behind, of double windows flanked by paired balconies added another five floors to the whole. The building was obviously a familiar landmark to the Viennese, and of some historical importance, for its model stood in mute dominance, unexplained. One had simply to walk through the arch.

Now it became clear that the scene-setting was over. The building that had arrested Mickey’s attention for a moment became revealed as the symbol for the beginning of open war, the site of a revolt or a siege, the home of a conspiracy. Beyond the archway the style of the exhibition was maintained, but the photographs had greater prominence, the tableaux were more violent, the propaganda bolder and more strident. Between these were glass cases containing uniforms, rifles, pistols, machine guns. Then came more photographs, of damaged houses, of frightened people nursing the wounded, and formal portraits of men in civilian dress; the dead, the captured, the beaten. It was over.

He hurried on, tiring of the blurred black and white and the pages of German print, and found another surprise, essentially a tent, from whose flimsy ceiling hung staggered rows of white flags, most bearing names, some left blank for the nameless. It was a simple affair of curtain draped over scaffolding, yet it managed to assume the presence of a chapel.

Mickey stood still in the gloom, looking up at the receding rows of names that meant nothing to him, and quietly admitted defeat. The people who had designed this place had obviously intended that it should leave a deeper mark on the visitor than the displays that preceded it. They had tried to make this plain memorial more evocative of the sadness of armed struggle than any number of pictures and rusting weapons, and they had succeeded.

“Mickey! Mickey! There you are. Mickey did you see what was back there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You missed it! Mickey you’ve got to come and look!”

Reluctantly, Mickey followed his wife, back the way he had come. He was fairly sure he knew what the matter was; the possibility of the coincidence had been lurking, almost feared, at the back of his mind all afternoon. Somewhere among all those photographs, in the middle of a crowd, was a striking, black-browed face that might truly be that of his father, and Elspeth had found it.

Lengthening his stride to preserve an appearance of calm, he matched her pace back through the uniforms and guns, and through the symbolic arch to the open space that gave it its dramatic power. On the far side of this Elspeth now stood in heraldic support of a large, board-mounted photograph, beaming as though she had just been called upon to declare it open.

Mickey remembered having passed the picture. It showed a small confrontation between uniformed men and civilians, one of whom was in the act of throwing a stone, while the others yelled and shook their fists. In the centre was a parked white military vehicle, its lines broken only by an observation slit at the front, and a mounted gun. Elspeth touched his arm, and pointed with her other hand to the background of the picture, empty save for the indistinct façade of a public building, a sweep of pavement white with snow, a lamp-post, and a single tall figure.

“There!”

It was his father all right, no question, but it was not the unremarkable record of his presence in the city that Mickey had expected. It was quite plainly something more than that, in the young but distinctive face almost behind the lamp post, in the arm across the chest, the hand pressed to the metal pillar streaked with snow, most of all in the attitude of the legs revealed in the open greatcoat, bent and meeting at the knee. It was a picture of fear.

This, then, was why the old man refused to talk about Vienna. It was, of course, absurd to suppose that never again, in all his bloody career, had he felt the tension and quickening of the heart that came with the likelihood of imminent pain or death. It was in the ability to derive vital energy from these that the courage of the soldier lay. What was pictured here was the hopeless paralysis of the coward, an enfeebling and shameful dread. This might be the first time, and the last, that Herbert Christie had felt that kind of fear, and the force of it was obvious and terrible.

Now Mickey, with a speed and thoroughness that surprised him, found himself revising his knowledge of his father’s life, amending every story and every citation with the footnote ‘This is why. . .’ For it was now clear that his father was haunted, not by the things that had scared him, but by the sensation itself of stifling impotence. To avoid reliving that moment he had run headlong into danger wherever he had found it, to the astonishment of comrades and enemy alike. Suddenly Mickey became aware of the awful potential of the picture, a tiny detail of the city’s history that could assume the power of nemesis.

“Pet, we mustn’t tell him about this.”

“You think it might upset him?”

“Are you kidding? Look at it! He didn’t seem all that keen to come here anyway. We’ve got to make sure he doesn’t. We’ll have to say it’s no good, or something. It’s too horrible.”

“OK. Whatever you say. Do you want to go now?”

“Yes. Do you mind?”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

They walked out the way they had come in, attracting a few raised eyebrows at the entrance for not completing the tour, and headed in silence for the nearer of the two visible stops along the tramline. Elspeth took hold of her husband’s hand. She was concerned about him now, for she realised that she had given him a nasty shock by drawing his attention to something whose discovery had been, for her, a source of pride. Nevertheless she made a mental note to get in touch with the organisers, with a view to securing a copy of that photograph.

Herbert had been so helpful and encouraging, he would surely not want her to pass up the chance of so valuable an illustration for her book. Once he was safely home again in England, it would have lost much of its power to distress him; for she was not entirely blind to its significance. At first the picture had conveyed to her only the fact of Herbert’s attendance at a small-scale fracas in the snow. But then, as she studied it more closely, she had noticed that there was something unusual, something disturbing, that could only be suggested by the poor definition of grey and black. There was something odd in the face, but she had despaired of pinning it down until she looked away, and found that oddness reproduced point for point, with perfect clarity, in Mickey’s own face. Then it had made sense.

As they sat together on the clean, hard seats of the tram that took them back into the centre of the city, Elspeth quietly gave thanks for the keen eye that had brought them to the event, and picked out Herbert’s face in all that vagueness of old newsprint. Elspeth honey, you have the eye of a great journalist. Pulitzer here we come. She had enjoyed the afternoon anyway, even though Mickey might be upset for a while. Seeing how people lived all those years ago, the clothes, the hairstyles, all this had been thrilling as well as informative, and a wonderful aid to the imagination; while the legendary Europe of the dictators, with its fancy uniforms and chanting crowds, sang and marched vividly in her mind as never before. It was good that people could make the effort to put on a show like that. It really brought history to life.