The Museum of Modern Love (31 page)

And always every letter concluded with the same few lines.

AND SO, AT LAST, THESE
two people meet in person on two chairs opposite one another. Marina Abramović and Arky Levin. I am assigned to stand beside them—memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am. House elf to the artists of paint, music, body, voice, form, word. I have acquired the habit of never saying too much. And the trick of dropping in, rapping on the door of their minds in the moment before waking, in the moment of solitude staring out a window, in a cafe where everything for a moment stops, under a tree watching sunlight, when life is a set of dominos falling into place or a single moment of revelation about what comes next.

Of course, it can be years between moments. Mostly people say no. They say no, I don't want to get out of bed. No, I don't want to work that hard. No, today I don't have time. No, I'm not listening right now. People say no so often, and then they wonder why they feel so desperate. Desperation does not especially interest me. Being available, paintbrush in hand, pen, keyboard, clay, stage, strings at the ready, is much more attractive. And sometimes I just need to wake things up.

Do you see now the difficulty of my task? All that they are is stored up loud and insistent inside them. But what does it take
to be an artist? They have to listen. But do they listen? Most people are filled up with a lifetime of noise and distraction that's hard to get past. At least that's how it feels.

Levin was listening now. He was pinned to the chair. Pinned to Marina's face. She was more formidable than he had imagined. Her eyes were moist ebony. He had imagined those eyes looking at him morning after morning, but they were deeper, she was further away and so much closer too. Was she seeing him? What was she seeing? From the crowd there was a percussive undertone that might have been breathing or heartbeats. Levin's own pulse was slippery. Above him the atrium soared into the sunlight. He thought of Leonard Cohen.

He saw himself standing in the
Kawa
forest. Marina walked beside him on the bank of a river. She laughed at something as if they were old friends. There were ferns crusted with the finest layer of snow and an arc of birds, long-necked and grey, passing overhead. There were trees with trunks wet and red and glistening and sun falling down like rain between the branches. He saw light falling as if it was rain. He saw every particle of life.

There is nothing to be afraid of
, she said to him.
We have walked this way before.
He saw two sets of footprints in the snow ahead. He heard a calling bird. He saw the moon arcing between the trees, a sliver of moon in a blue sky, and she said,
We are all these things. We are no different to earth. We are no different to time. We are rock and leaf and bird, earth-born and earth-fed and earth-returned when we die. For forty thousand years we have been
eating and living and burying ourselves on this one sphere of earth. See how we know the pattern of things, if we only watch.

He saw Marina standing on the edge of a sand dune in another place where the sky was magenta and the earth was pink. Then they were in another place where two moons rose above a midnight sea, and they walked the shoreline. He knew he was going home.

But not yet
, she said.
Not yet. You have forgotten something very important.

He felt a sense of utter loneliness as if he had never lived in a world with anyone else. He wanted to hold Marina's hand but she was a ghost and she was Lydia.

Was there a secret tally somewhere in every marriage for each kiss, each orgasm, each Sunday morning? He saw the counter ticking over and coming to a halt. He saw Lydia's eyelashes, so very pale without mascara. He looked at her eyes and they were still the green of the sea thirty metres out.

‘Lydia?' he said.

He saw her in a white room. He saw her watching the sea. He saw the sunlight that fell on the floor. He saw her lift her hand. She reached for a pencil. It fell.

He bent down to pick it up for her.

‘Lydia?' he said again.

She did not turn her face. He opened her fingers very gently and placed the pencil in her hand. There was a notebook on her lap. He leaned down and smelled her hair.

‘Can we go home now?' he asked. ‘I think it's time we went home.'

Marina leaned towards him and he was speared with pain. He felt as if her face was that of an ancient woman, and now a boy, and now a girl, a monk, a nun. Now it was a bird, and now a
fish, and now a tree and now it was a crystal, filled with power and understanding. Again it became human, but it was a face both eternal and temporal, dead and alive, calm and terrifying.

It is not about comfort
, he heard her say, as if she had spoken the words right into his head.
It is not about convenient. It is not about forgetting. It is about remembering. It is about commitment. Only you can do it. And you must be fearless
.

When he left the square he hardly trusted himself to walk. Healayas watched him go and did not disturb him. She knew how deconstructed it was possible to feel after the experience of Marina.

Downstairs in the lobby, Levin looked at his watch. He found a quiet spot by the rear doors and dialled the number of Paul Wharton at his law firm. Wharton would not be in until tomorrow morning, he was told. Levin made an appointment. After that he called Alice. He remembered Healayas, and texted her, but she had to stay in New York for the final day of
The Artist is Present.
Then he rang Hal.

‘Do you think we could take a drive?' he asked.

AND SO WE ARRIVE AT
day seventy-five. The final convergence. The floodlights are on. Marco Anelli watches Marina Abramović emerge from the green room and cross the square. He watches Davide arrange her white dress about the chair. He sees Marina's body submit to the chair this one last time. They are all smiling, but he does not want to think about it being the last day. He cannot afford to lose concentration.

He settles his camera and tripod at the top of the square and takes a single photograph of Marina as she stares at him down the long lens. The security team take their respective places.

One of the guards raises two fingers to indicate two minutes to go. The live feed clicks on. Viewers in Chicago, in Minneapolis, Montreal and Mexico, in Cape Town and Cairo, Sydney and Salzburg, in Helsinki, Istanbul and Iceland begin watching.

The gallery, the noise, the time, the people, the fatigue, the weather, the concrete beneath his feet, the white walls, the face of Marina, all of it had become like waves on the beach. Marco has lived so close to it he no longer hears it. Now sometimes in the atrium, when his thoughts arrive, they sound so loud it feels as if his mind is shouting.

When the queue is assembled, he goes along the line collecting permission slips as if it was any other day. He focuses the lens on each face and watches for the moment when intensity spills from the eyes. He settles into the space and the light and the performance.

He has moved past himself. The pain that had been vivid in his legs and lower back, and his neck and shoulders, after almost three months on his feet every day, bending over his camera, standing on concrete, has left him. He feels light, almost transparent. He has survived the show. When he'd agreed to do it, he'd never thought of it as an act of survival. He had wanted to do it with all his heart. And now it is almost over. It reminds him of a question he was asked a few days before by one of the guards. ‘When you get to heaven, what would you like God to say to you?' ‘Not now!' he had joked. But today he just wants God to say, ‘Well done.'

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 ABRAMOVIĆ'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.