whispered lineage

www.jackmagazine.com/issue9/fictionmkovan2.html

A short ‘real fiction’, observed in Prague, March 2004. History and forgetting, reality and simulacra – and their double deceptions. Published online in Jack Magazine, 2005; Tirra Lirra, Melbourne, 2004, (print).

Man in a Wheelchair

Not far from the Charles Bridge they gather around a man in a wheelchair. It is not the man alone, or even his wheelchair, that draws them – he is also surrounded by another group, subsidiary to that of the people themselves. This second group is distinguished from everyone else – other tourists, casual observers, general passersby – by an ambience unique to them: their activity, erratic but loose, punctuated by laughter, is itself held in an aura of bland conspiracy, as if they share a confidence or a knowledge, a complacency of solidarity that is not so self-conscious as to demand attention, but aware enough of its privilege to know it is always being observed.

The lights and technical equipment that surround them – another concentric frame inside all the others – seem to confirm them in their singularity. No one else has access to the expensive apparatus; it is theirs to use at their discretion. Right now it lies propped vacantly against the old stone walls; the high spotlights pointing to the heavily-flowing waters of the Vltava river below. It is a calm, uncannily featureless day in Prague, but it is not as if the city stands still, as, at other times in its history, it doubtless has. Too much seems given over to the animation by the bridge for the day to be wholly surrendered to potential passionlessness. Many are there who would desire it, a beautiful inertia that would allow them only to watch the river, or sit by a wall, and wait for something to come to them. They could wait, on a day like this one, for an age before something more desirable should arrive. But that would already be in a different time, and the spurts of vital intention, of a sheer dedication to life that almost bleed through the air of Prague in this one, have to go forfeited. It would be a different life altogether.

In this one the large, constantly moving crowd press in closer to the man who at first has drawn their attention. They are all tourists, very young or barely out of school, mostly Italian, who chew gum and spin their heads quickly, as if on greased axles, towards different companions to suddenly throw out an insult or a joke for general consumption. They are in a perpetual distraction, moving like tadpoles among eachother, teenage lovers exchanging looks and reproaches, things to eat, cameras, notebooks, cigarettes, soft-drinks. They are never still, they all appear magically happy, as if Italy – or their absence from it – can only be the sundered homeland that provokes their delighted, disorderly charm with the paradise regained that surrounds them here. Their delight now is catalysed by the man in the wheelchair, who though he is entirely inert, generates it seems from his very immobility a constant flurry of attention around him.

He is young, though hunched in the chair, his face unshaven, attractive despite the thinning of his hair that makes him appear much older than he likely is. He munches on something, and grins, irregularly, as if he is waiting indefinitely for something but determined to welcome delay for as long as it lasts. He knows, after all, that he is being paid by the hour, and the longer he must wait there, the more surely will the dividends eventually come to him. Two women busy themselves around him – they apply touches of make-up to his face, daub their fingers in his hair, as if it is a sticky substance and they do not want to lose their fingers in its wispy strands. They peck his face with a pencil, to emphasise the stubble on his cheeks. The girls in the Italian crowd watch the women and call out, loud but embarrassed, to put more make-up on the young man.

“Rouge!” they yell out. “Rouge!”

The word rouge hangs in the air, not far from the sombre density of the bridge and the pale dull of the river: someone out of opera-buffa who has wandered into one of Prague’s gothic cathedrals. It stands loudly there, hands on hips, and demands an audience. The make-up women frown at the girls, but also laugh – they know that nothing the Italian girls can say can remove them from the exclusivity of what they are doing, of who they are, and so they are able to easily step aside from any potential affront. There is an invisible barrier that separates them from the others – not one of coercion, but one that comes from the audience itself and its respect for the terms of spectatorship: which pleasure is worth too much to jeopardise by the poor reward any outright disturbance could provide. The girls want to be able to watch, from the safety of distance, and remain unseen by what they observe. In the same way the women with make-up want to be seen, not as star-performers, but as indispensable elements to the spectacle, without which any performance would be a diminished one.

Because the performer, for his part, is ready to perform. Someone puts down their take-away coffee and reads from a clipboard. There is a sudden silence as all those assembled focus intensely on the presence of the young man in the wheelchair, unable to move and seemingly unable to speak. “Rouge!” is the only thing that is heard then, again, rebounding through the bodies on both sides of the camera, in the cracked voice of one of the adolescent Italians. He only yells it once, already his friends are laughing out loud, pushing him and threatening to throw him into the river. The girls hurl insults and laughter, at the male element at large, so that the audience have become the performers, and the real performers must wait before they are able to proceed to their – only marginally more important – business.

But once the laughter has died, something else starts, which threatens to interminably delay the sequence the film-crew have spent all of that morning preparing for. Thundering peals of the cathedral bells come out of the emptiness of the sky, repeated cascades of almost subterranean sound, as if it has been bottled up in a green earth far, far below, and erupts now out of the turrets of churches and castles and all of the old beautiful things of Europe. The wide-awake camera that might have caught the unshaven grin of the young actor in the wheelchair, or even the girl who had first called out for more rouge, grips the frame and swings in a fluid, fast panorama away from the crowd and the film-crew, further down the river, around a wall that in the fast-motion passes in the fluttering of tattered poster-bills that flank its surface. The shreds of paper could move merely by force of the fierce tolling of the bells, but there is no time to gauge how it might happen that way. Because the frame rests now, inevitably, on a man, another man, but a much older one, also unshaven and with broken teeth, that would be expertly crafted by make-up women if they were not real. A man in a wheelchair.

There is no sound apart from the bells, and they soon fade and are not replaced by Italian laughter, film-set humour, gum-chewing or anything else. The man sits in his chair, entirely immobile, his eyes barely open, and holds out a paper-cup for coins. In the time he waits there new tourist throngs scatter down his street – it can be no-one else’s – and pass him there. They do not know who he is, and never stop to put coins in his cup. They rationalise perhaps that the disuse of his legs does not really warrant his beggardom. He is old too, and old people ought not to stay out in the street, where they can be so easily seen, scrutinised, out in the open like sores.

Few others though, observe or even glance at the man. Hundreds pass him without registering that he is there, and there are only a very few who ever smile to him as they pass. Those that do might wonder if he notices them, or would especially care if he did. He is one of those who, more than thirty years before, when there was blood in the streets, had been taken to a police-cell and given the privilege of having his legs broken there by his own countrymen. One of the martyrs, in his defiance of the invaders of those times, too, had died for the man’s suffering, his broken legs, for the ignorance of the policemen who had carried out orders for the wrong masters. The commemoration of the martyr’s self-immolation is there now, thirty years later, and tourists and local people alike go there to pay their respects, to take photographs of the ground made sacred by one man’s absolute sacrifice.

The man in the wheelchair, not the young actor but his solitary, aging double, is unable to make the journey: not only because his wheelchair would be unable to accommodate the terrain, but because he might not anymore know a reason for taking it. He is already forgotten, and the more that world already gone is able to forget him, the more he is able to forget what it might once have meant to him. And with forgetting comes space, the frame left absent against the wall, to be filled in with other events, repetitions, or re-enactments of old history. No-one will know where to look, to pay their respects, to call for more “Rouge!”, to point the lens of the camera, when no-one is there to tell them.

The film-set, somewhere in artificial space, somewhere that could be another Prague, the double to his own, composes itself again, and the other one, the actor, dutifully plays his part in front of the lens, this time without disturbance. There are no sudden shouts, and no blood, real or otherwise, flows in the street by the heavy waters of the Vltava. Reality is caught, held and captured: there is no simulacrum to pretend to take its place.

Prague, March 2004