The Museum of Modern Love(70)

Here was a snake around her shoulders. There were crystals on her feet. A scorpion on her face. A snake. Tears. Onions burning her mouth and throat and eyes. She could hear herself saying, ‘I want to go away, somewhere so far that nothing matters any more. I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all this. I want to not want any more.’

Here was the doorway where she stood with Ulay, looking into his eyes while people pushed between them. Then she was on a chair, dizzy and losing all control of herself as the drugs for schizophrenia and then catatonia took hold of her.

A skeleton lay on her and she breathed and the bones rose and fell as ribcages did every day in the living. Now she was staring up at The House with the Ocean View. Dieter and all the staff had gone home and there was only the wooden bed, the wooden chair, the metronome and the silence and herself, eating her own madness, chewing away on the collective insanity of the world through the long hungry night.

Here were the children in Laos holding replica AK47s. Here were Eight Lessons on Happiness with a Happy End. Seven Laotian girls between pink sheets accompanied by their machine guns.

Here was an arrow poised to pierce her heart and Ulay holding the bow. Here was the van driving round and round and round for sixteen hours while her voice over the loudspeaker slowly broke down. There was the woman who fell in love with a man who had the same birthday as her: 30 November.

Here was the flesh of her stomach and the star that must be cut into it with the razor blade, again and again and again. Here was the child fed on her mother’s discipline and the pain that came if she failed.

Here was the child who went with her grandmother each day into the incense and coloured light that poured through the high windows of the cathedral. Here was the child who watched her grandmother light the candles at dusk in the apartment, making shadows that danced down the hallway to bed.

Here was the woman who was once a girl and will yet be dead. Here is Marina Abramovi?, who knows something of what life can be—a series of moments, blades and snakes, honey and wine, urgency and delay, patience and generosity, forgiveness and despair and a hundred ways to say I love you. Here was Antony Hegarty singing, ‘Hope there’s someone who will take care of me, when I die, when I go. Hope there’s someone who will set my heart free, nice to hold when I’m tired . . .’

This is it, she thought. I am dying. I am living. They are both entirely the same.

It was easy to gain strength from chaos because it had about it the abyss—always so tantalising—as the heroin addicts knew. But the journey to the abyss was short-lived. The harder road was to draw strength and not power. To gain footing not in the wild uncertainty of immortality but the abiding knowing of mortality.

The days had been fields of faces, bright, unique, vivid, strange. There was no greater solitude, and no greater connection, than being within the performance with the audience holding her in its gaze. She had expected it to be an energy exchange. A simple thing. But it hadn’t been simple. Every face was a song that carried her like love or pain into nothingness. Every face told countless lives and memories and parts of humanity she had never glimpsed, not through all the years of seeking. Here was the truth of people writ mysterious in every line and angle and eye. The taste of their lifetimes faded on her tongue as they each stood to go.

Until at last there was Klaus. Dear Klaus. He was her cue. After Klaus it was the end. It was day seventy-five and there was only one thing to do. Still, she took in his eyes, the sense of no time and all time and the infinite words of silence. She loved him. She loved everyone in the room. She loved everyone alive and everyone who had ever lived to bring them all to this time, all the millennia that had gone before and the millennia of people yet to come. She felt enormous.

Klaus dropped his head. He stood.

Don’t go, not yet! It is too soon, she thought.

But Klaus was walking away.

Suddenly she sensed her mother high on the balcony looking down at her. She heard her voice as if Danica was right beside her.

‘You must step away from the fields and forests, from the voices and tears, Marina,’ she said. ‘I wave you a farewell. You must slip back into the skin of yourself. And I go on. I will see you when you are ready. But not too soon. That place you have in the country, spend time there. Take a new lover. This is your great work. You have added a thread to the great tapestry of art. This is what they will write about. So rest now. Be happy. You’re not getting any younger. And believe me, you are dead a long time.’

Marina didn’t want it to end. She wanted to stay in this place. She didn’t want to surrender to the wild wind of life. But it was time.

She dropped her head and for a moment pure grief struck through her. She must let it go, this room, this story, this work. It was over. She must relinquish this atrium where she had lived from spring until summer. She must give up the faces that had shown her a mystery that had no explanation. But how to stand? How to rise and meet this room?

She felt her legs trembling. Would she stumble? She was the sadhu walking from the cave. She lifted her head and opened her eyes. She summoned the strength in her legs and back. She felt the floor beneath her feet. She breathed in once and then again. A rush of cold burned through her.

Then she was standing. Her arms were outstretched. She felt the welcome of the crowd swelling inside her. Cameras were flashing. Applause was rising up into the atrium. It was pure cacophony, a study in simple, unbridled delight.