The Museum of Modern Love(68)
He had not expected the emotion that crowds the atrium, the joy that is in so many eyes and faces. It is as if some new idea of life has occurred to them. If I die today, Marco thinks, then it will be too soon.
AFTER DANICA ABRAMOVI?’S FUNERAL IN Belgrade, Marina had gone to her mother’s apartment to begin the work of cleaning out her mother’s things. In the bedroom she had found clothes ordered by colour—beige suits then blue suits, summer coats and winter coats. Light-coloured shoes, dark-coloured shoes.
The bed had a pale green counterpane. The bedside lamp that was never turned off in the night was finally off. In the drawer there was still a loaded gun. All her life Marina had known her mother’s war stories. Her father had told them often. On the battlefield, as strangers, her mother gave her father a transfusion of her own blood when there was no other way to save his life. She had begun a degree in medicine six months before the Nazi invasion in 1941. Vojo had survived and, when he had recovered, he had ridden back into battle. The war had gone on.
A year later, still fighting, Vojo came across a group of sick partisans fleeing oncoming German soldiers. He lifted back the blanket to discover the woman, Danica, who had given him her blood. She was dying from typhus. He lifted her onto his white horse and rode with her to safety.
Danica never talked about the war. She sat in silence as Vojo told stories of waiting in snow for the Germans to ride past the explosives he and his men had buried in the roots of trees. How he was shot twelve times in the back and was saved by the thickness of his coat. The time an axe handle flew all the way across a river and nearly cut off his hand. The time he had to eat his own dead horse and later lost his moustache in the heat of an explosion.
But while cleaning out her mother’s apartment, Marina came across a trunk under the bed she had never seen before. Marina spread the contents on the green counterpane. There were scrapbooks full of articles about her shows. But under the scrapbooks was a leather wallet containing documents signed by Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia. They noted that her mother had fought in seven Partisan battles against the Nazis. They awarded her mother the highest medal for bravery. In 1944, while she had been leading a convoy of trucks filled with wounded soldiers to a nearby hospital, they had come under intense fire. The fuel tanks were targeted. Everywhere there was fire and explosions. Chaos ensued. But Danica Rosic carried thirty soldiers, men and women, some half-conscious, some with terrible injuries, on her back and in her arms. Hauling them through the snow, somehow avoiding bullets and grenades, she brought each one of them to safety.
AT HOME, JANE MILLER WATCHED Marina Abramovi? on the webcam.
‘Today is the day,’ she kept thinking. ‘Today is the day.’
And she ignored the washing she’d done for her daughter that needed bringing in, and the ants that were invading a light switch on the wall, and the emails she needed to reply to, and watched. She understood that her fate and Marina’s were somehow linked. When Marina stood up, Jane too must stand up. There had been this time of mourning and the mourning would live forever in her. Karl was as much a piece of her as her liver or pancreas. Grief was as tangible as rain. Millions of people were suffering from it at any one time. It’ll pass, people said, but it didn’t really.
Grief was a threshold thing that lived at the heart of the inevitable. She sensed that when Marina stood up, she, Jane, would take her place one step back from the inevitable. She would walk across Spain. She would carry her grief and her love and her observations of a life of fifty-five years. Here at home her children and their children would be among their own inevitabilities. And maybe this was art, she thought, having spent years trying to define it and pin it to the line like a shirt on a windy day. There you are, art! You capture moments at the heart of life. A boy waiting for the eggs to poach. A crowd listening to music in a park or walking in the rain or bathing in the Seine. Liberty leading the people and the guns of the firing squad raised against the men at the wall. The bloom of waterlilies and the anguish of a scream, the red square that lived in every heart, a rhythm of colour across a wheat field, stars wheeling through a night sky.
She was watching Marina Abramovi? in her white dress on this final day of her enduring love. For hadn’t it been that for Abramovi?? An act of love that said, This is all I have been, this is what I have become in travelling the places of my soul and my nation, my family and my ancestral blood. This is what I have learned. It is all about connection. If we do it with the merest amount of intention and candour and fearlessness, this is the biggest love we can feel. It’s more than love but we don’t have a bigger word. It was Kant’s thing, Jane thought. The thing that is, but is also inexplicable, until you see that it just is.
She knew once she would have tried to call it God, but that had caused so many problems in the world, trying to say what God was or is. She thought there ought to be another word and she decided she had a few hundred miles to think on that in Spain under a wide sky on a pilgrimage. And she laughed aloud, because to ruminate on the name of the thought that was God on a long walk seemed fitting. She and Karl would go a long way on that together.
She continued to gaze at the woman in the white dress. She sat and watched in honour of this woman sitting. She watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live?