The Museum of Modern Love(23)

‘How long were they married?’

‘Eight years.’

‘Mourning,’ said Jane. ‘Maybe she’s in mourning. How awful.’

‘I can’t imagine many men could live with Marina,’ said Brittika. ‘I mean, she’d be tough.’

‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘She’s tough. But I don’t think it’s toughness that keeps her there. I don’t think that’s what makes all these people come and want to sit. All the great art makes us feel something quite indescribable. Perhaps it’s not the best word—but there doesn’t seem to be a better one to capture how art can be . . . transformative. A kind of access to a universal wisdom.’

‘I’m going to use that,’ said Brittika, tapping away. ‘I mean, she’s using the audience to create this effect, but the audience has also created this experience by how seriously everyone has taken it.’

‘So what makes it art?’ Jane asked.

Brittika smiled.

‘Why does most everyone who ever sees your Van Gogh’s Sunflowers kind of sigh with happiness?’ Jane asked.

Brittika had never thought of him as her Van Gogh. There was an old Holland where everyone was blond-haired and blue-eyed, she knew. Then there was now. Full of Africans and Middle Easterns and Asians like her, so that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutch seemed to be a lingering oddity in some parts. A bit like London.

After a while, Jane said, ‘I wonder what would have happened if they had stayed together—Marina and Ulay.’

Brittika shrugged. ‘I think she’s been a better artist beyond him. When you look at what’s upstairs . . . the retrospective, this performance. Her father, her mother, Ulay. They were steps along the way. Now she’s alone.’

‘So it’s a funeral?’

‘Yes, she’s always liked the idea of her funeral,’ said Brittika.

‘And she invited us!’ Jane laughed. She grasped the younger woman’s hand briefly. ‘I will go home and never forget this,’ she said.

I feel as if I know her, Brittika thought. I’m sitting here on a concrete floor. I’ve made two trips from Amsterdam to see this and I’ll probably make another one yet. I’ve spent three years of my life writing about her. I know what she has said and done, but being here, I look at her and realise that even though I thought I knew who she was, maybe I don’t. It’s hard to tell what’s fact and what she’s told over and over again so it seems like truth, but maybe it isn’t. I want her to remember me. But she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what it’s taken these last few years. I may never meet her, though I’ve stared into her eyes longer than I’ve done with anybody. Perhaps I am just another art student. Maybe she is only nice to people who have something she needs. She knows Amsterdam. It was her home for years. She and I have almost certainly walked some of the same streets, visited the same galleries, eaten in the same restaurants, braced ourselves against the wind off the North Sea, seen the same canals frozen over, seen the daffodils in spring, maybe ridden bikes on the same paths. All that time she was in Amsterdam, she was the same Marina Abramovi? who would one day be here. I have no idea where I’ll be at her age. Or who I’ll be. Will I have slept in a field, or stood naked before a table of implements in Naples? No, unlikely. I couldn’t do what she does. I have no appetite for pain. Or deprivation. Perhaps I got all that out of my system young, before, back in China, before being adopted. What did I love then? I’ll never know. Maybe I loved nothing. Maybe I learned to love, but coming late it’s harder. I wonder if I ever waited a very long time for someone to come back. I think I probably did.

Later, the man with the angel eyes sat again. He wept and Marina wept with him. Then the announcement came over the loudspeaker before Brittika was ready for the day to end. The gallery is closing in fifteen minutes.

She thought of Marina in the green room slipping off the red dress. Perhaps Davide, her assistant, would tell her it was raining outside. She would put on pants and a sweater. He would hold out her coat.

‘Come. Time to go home.’

Brittika knew that at some level she was quite terrified of Marina Abramovi?. That was part of what kept her working on her PhD. She wondered what terrified Marina. At 1 am, did Marina wake panicked and straighten the sheets, fold under the corners until there was no trace of her body as her mother had made her do, midnight after midnight? Did her heart still pound when she woke? Did she have to tell herself that she wasn’t seven any more? Nor ten. Nor twenty. Her mother was dead and could never wake her again. Could never hit her again.

Yet when her mother had lay dying, it had been Marina who had massaged her feet with lavender oil. Tended her bedsores. Loved her.

Brittika and Jane found a nearby diner and ate chicken burgers and key lime pie. Then Brittika returned to the tiny 43rd Street hotel room with the noisy aircon and dry white sheets. She typed, her back up against the laminated bedhead. At 11am she put away her laptop and did some relaxation poses. She could put together the pieces of Abramovi?’s life this way and that, but what was at the heart of that unconquerable gift for endurance?

At 2 am she woke and browsed again the faces on the Flickr website showing everyone who had sat with Marina since 9 March. The boy with the mop of black hair, the girl with the vivid green eyes, the woman with the splatter of freckles. The expressions were so bare. Each of them spoke of days lived, life unfolded and refolded, opened and shut, and all of the days weathering a face. She saw her own face, the curious light in her eyes, the mouth that was tight. The worry that seemed to sit on her brow. She didn’t want to look worried. She wanted, next time, to smile.