Selected Essays of John Berger (66 page)

Among the first plots a solitary man in a raincoat, leaning against a birch tree, was sobbing, his fists thrust deep into his pockets. In some
puddles, cloud was reflected; into others soil had crumbled, muddying them, so that there were no reflections. The man glanced up at the sky with a look of recognition. Had they, one evening when they were both drunk, reminisced together?

With questions and partial answers, mourners and visitors to the cemetery were trying to make sense of the deaths and their own lives, just as previously the dead had done. This work of the imagination, to which everybody and everything contributes, can never be entirely finished, either in the Khovanskoie cemetery, twenty miles south of Moscow, or anywhere else in the world.

1983

It was the last day of his life. Of course we did not know it then — not until almost ten o’clock in the evening. Three of us spent the day with him: Lou (his wife), Anya and myself. I can write now only of my own experience of that day. If I tried to write about theirs — much as I was conscious of it at the time and later — I would nevertheless run the risk of writing fiction.

Ernst Fischer was in the habit of spending the summer in a small village in Styria. He and Lou stayed in the house of three sisters who were old friends and who had been Austrian Communists with Ernst and his two brothers in the 1930s. The youngest of the three sisters, who now runs the house, was imprisoned by the Nazis for hiding and aiding political refugees. The man with whom she was then in love was beheaded for a similar political offence.

It is necessary to describe this in order not to give a false impression of the garden which surrounds their house. The garden is full of flowers, large trees, grass banks and a lawn. A stream flows through it, conducted through a wooden pipe the diameter of an immense barrel. It runs the length of the garden, then across fields to a small dynamo which belongs to a neighbour. Everywhere in the garden there is the sound of water, gentle but persistent. There are two small fountains: tiny pin-like jets of water force their way hissing through holes in the wooden barrel-line; water flows into and empties continually from a nineteenth-century swimming pool (built by the grandfather of the three sisters): in this pool, now surrounded by tall grass, and itself green, trout swim and occasionally jump splashing to the surface.

It often rains in Styria, and if you are in this house you sometimes have the impression that it is still raining after it has stopped on account of the sound of water in the garden. Yet the garden is not damp and many colours of many flowers break up its greenness. The garden is a kind of
sanctuary. But to grasp its full meaning one must, as I said, remember that in its outhouses men and women were hiding for their lives thirty years ago and were protected by the three sisters who now arrange vases of flowers and let rooms to a few old friends in the summer in order to make ends meet.

When I arrived in the morning Ernst was walking in the garden. He was thin and upright. And he trod very lightly, as though his weight, such as it was, was never fully planted on the ground. He wore a wide-brimmed white and grey hat which Lou had recently bought for him. He wore the hat like he wore all his clothes, lightly, elegantly, but without concern. He was fastidious — not about details of dress, but about the nature of appearances.

The gate to the garden was difficult to open and shut, but he had mastered it and so, as usual, he fastened it behind me. The previous day Lou had felt somewhat unwell. I enquired how she was. ‘She is better,’ he said, ‘you have only to look at her!’ He said this with youthful, unrestricted pleasure. He was seventy-three years old and when he was dying the doctor, who did not know him, said he looked older, but he had none of the muted expressions of the old. He took present pleasures at their full face-value and his capacity to do this was in no way diminished by political disappointment or by the bad news which since 1968 had persistently arrived from so many places. He was a man without a trace, without a line on his face, of bitterness. Some, I suppose, might therefore call him an innocent. They would be wrong. He was a man who refused to jettison or diminish his very high quotient of belief. Instead he readjusted its objects and their relative order. Recently he
believed
in scepticism. He even believed in the necessity of apocalyptic visions in the hope that they would act as warnings.

It is the surety and strength of his convictions which now make it seem that he died so suddenly. His health had been frail since childhood. He was often ill. Recently his eyesight had begun to fail and he could read only with a powerful magnifying glass — more often Lou read to him. Yet despite this it was quite impossible for anyone who knew him to suppose that he was dying slowly, that every year he belonged a little less vehemently to life. He was fully alive because he was fully convinced.

What was he convinced of? His books, his political interventions, his speeches are there on record to answer the question. Or do they not answer it fully enough? He was convinced that capitalism would eventually destroy man — or be overthrown. He had no illusions about the ruthlessness of the ruling class everywhere. He recognized that we lacked a model for Socialism. He was impressed by and highly interested in what is happening in China, but he did not believe in a Chinese model. What is so hard, he said, is that we are forced back to offering visions.

We walked towards the end of the garden, where there is a small lawn
surrounded by bushes and a willow tree. He used to lie there talking with animated gestures, fingers plucking, hands turning out and drawing in — as though literally winding the wool from off his listeners’ eyes. As he talked, his shoulders bent forward to follow his hands; as he listened, his head inclined forward to follow the speaker’s words. (He knew the exact angle at which to adjust the back of his deckchair.)

Now the same lawn, the deckchairs piled in the outhouse, appears oppressively, flagrantly empty. It is far harder to walk across it without a shiver than it was to turn down the sheet and look again and again at his face. The Russian believers say that the spirits of the departed stay in their familiar surroundings for forty days. Perhaps this is based on a fairly accurate observation of the stages of mourning. At any rate it is hard for me to believe that if a total stranger wandered into the garden now, he would not notice that the end under the willow tree surrounded by bushes was flagrantly empty, like a deserted house on the point of becoming a ruin. Its emptiness is palpable. And yet it is not.

It had already begun to rain and so we went to sit in his room for a while before going out to lunch. We used to sit, the four of us, round a small round table, talking. Sometimes I faced the window and looked out at the trees and the forests on the hills. That morning I pointed out that when the frame with the mosquito net was fitted over the window, everything looked more or less two-dimensional and so composed itself. We give too much weight to space, I went on — there’s perhaps more of nature in a Persian carpet than in most landscape paintings. ‘We’ll take the hills down, push the trees aside and hang up carpets for you,’ said Ernst. ‘Your other trousers,’ remarked Lou, ‘why don’t you put them on as we’re going out?’ Whilst he changed we went on talking. ‘There,’ he said, smiling ironically at the task he had just performed, ‘is that better now?’ ‘They are very elegant, but they are the same pair!’ I said. He laughed, delighted at this remark. Delighted because it emphasized that he had changed his trousers only to satisfy Lou’s whim, and that that was reason enough for him; delighted because an insignificant difference was treated as though it didn’t exist; delighted because, encapsulated in a tiny joke, there was a tiny conspiracy against the existent.

The Etruscans buried their dead in chambers under the ground and on the walls they painted scenes of pleasure and everyday life such as the dead had known. To have the light to see what they were painting they made a small hole in the ground above and then used mirrors to reflect the sunlight onto the particular image on which they were working. With words I try to decorate, as though it were a tomb, the last day of his life.

We were going to have lunch in a
pension
high up in the forests and hills. The idea was to look and see whether it would be suitable for Ernst
to work there during September or October. Earlier in the year Lou had written to dozens of small hotels and boarding houses and this was the only one which was cheap and sounded promising. They wanted to take advantage of my having a car to go and have a look.

There are no scandals to make. But there is a contrast to draw. Two days after his death there was a long article about him in
Le Monde
. ‘Little by little,’ it wrote, ‘Ernst Fischer has established himself as one of the most original and rewarding thinkers of “heretical” Marxism.’ He had influenced an entire generation of the left in Austria. During the last four years he was continually denounced in Eastern Europe for the significant influence he had had on the thinking of the Czechs who had created the Prague Spring. His books were translated into most languages. But the conditions of his life during the last five years were cramped and harsh. The Fischers had little money, were always subject to financial worries, and lived in a small, noisy workers’ flat in Vienna. Why not? I hear his opponents ask. Was he better than the workers? No, but he needed professional working conditions. In any case he himself did not complain. But with the unceasing noise of families and radios in the flats above and on each side he found it impossible to work as concentratedly in Vienna as he wished to do and was capable of doing. Hence the annual search for quiet, cheap places in the country — where three months might represent so many chapters completed. The three sisters’ house was not available after August.

We drove up a steep dust road through the forest. Once I asked a child the way in my terrible German and the child did not understand and simply stuffed her fist into her mouth in amazement. The others laughed at me. It was raining lightly: the trees were absolutely still. And I remember thinking as I drove round the hairpin bends that if I could define or realize the nature of the submission of the trees, I would learn something about the human body too — at least about the human body when loved. The rain ran down the trees. A leaf is so easily moved. A breath of wind is sufficient. And yet not a leaf moved.

We found the
pension
. The young woman and her husband were expecting us and they showed us to a long table where some other guests were already eating. The room was large with a bare wooden floor and big windows from which you looked over the shoulders of some nearby steep fields across the forest to the plain below. It was not unlike a canteen in a youth hostel, except that there were cushions on the benches and flowers on the tables. The food was simple but good. After the meal we were to be shown the rooms. The husband came over with an architect’s plan in his hands. ‘By next year everything will be different,’ he explained; ‘the owners want to make more money and so they’re going to convert the rooms and put bathrooms in and put up their prices. But this autumn you can still have the two rooms on the
top floor as they are, and there’ll be nobody else up there, you’ll be quiet.’

We climbed to the rooms. They were identical, side by side, with the lavatory on the same landing opposite them. Each room was narrow, with a bed against the wall, a wash-basin and an austere cupboard, and at the end of it a window with a view of miles and miles of landscape. ‘You can put a table in front of the window and work here.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘You’ll finish the book.’ ‘Perhaps not all of it, but I could get much done.’ ‘You must take it,’ I said. I visualized him sitting at the table in front of the window, looking down at the still trees. The book was the second volume of his autobiography. It covered the period 1945-55 — when he had been very active in Austrian and international politics — and it was to deal principally with the development and consequences of the Cold War which he saw, I think, as the counter-revolutionary reaction, on both sides of what was to become the Iron Curtain, to the popular victories of 1945. I visualized his magnifying glass on the small table, his note-pad, the pile of current reference books, the chair pushed away when, stiffly but light on his feet, he had gone downstairs to take his regular walk before lunch. ‘You must take it,’ I said again.

We went for a walk together, the walk into the forest he would take each morning. I asked him why in the first volume of his memoirs he wrote in several distinctly different styles.

‘Each style belongs to a different person.’

‘To a different aspect of yourself?’

‘No, rather it belongs to a different self.’

‘Do these different selves coexist, or, when one is predominant, are the others absent?’

‘They are present together at the same time. None can disappear. The two strongest are my violent, hot, extremist, romantic self and the other my distant, sceptical self.’

‘Do they discourse together in your head?’

‘No.’ (He had a special way of saying No. As if he had long ago considered the question at length and after much patient investigation had arrived at the answer.)

‘They watch each other,’ he continued. ‘The sculptor Hrdlicka has done a head of me in marble. It makes me look much younger than I am. But you can see these two predominant selves in me — each corresponding to a side of my face. One is perhaps a little like Danton, the other a little like Voltaire.’

As we walked along the forest path, I changed sides so as to examine his face, first from the right and then from the left. Each eye was different and was confirmed in its difference by the corner of the mouth on each side of his face. The right side was tender and wild. He had mentioned Danton. I thought rather of an animal: perhaps a kind of goat, light on its
feet, a chamois maybe. The left side was sceptical but harsher: it made judgements but kept them to itself, it appealed to reason with an unswerving certainty. The left side would have been inflexible had it not been compelled to live with the right. I changed sides again to check my observations.