Nothing is Black

FRIDA KAHLO

SHE ARRIVED
in the town late on Monday evening. Kevin had phoned Claire that morning to say that she was on her way; he had seen her off some twenty minutes earlier. Claire had promised to collect the visitor. ‘Be sure to be there on time; Kevin said. ‘She’ll panic if you’re not there.’

But Claire knew that the bus would be late: it always was. She had plenty of time to buy the things she needed: a chicken, a fruit cake, some real coffee; things which, while they could in no way be considered luxurious or exotic were not available in Rita’s shop, and so could only be bought on her trips to town.

She put the things in the boot of her car, but didn’t bother to lock up. The vehicle parked next to hers was a camper van with German plates and two mountain bikes fixed securely to the back of it. She walked down to the harbour. A damp stink of whiskey, smoke and stale porter wafted out from the swinging door of the pub as she walked past. It was almost a relief, masking, if only for a moment, the fishy stink that perpetually hung over the town. It came from the fish-processing plant. She’ll notice that as soon as she gets off the bus, Claire thought. She had watched visitors arrive before now,
seen the look of disgust on their faces as soon as they got a whiff of the air. But the smell wasn’t as much of a problem as it might have been elsewhere, she thought, for the little town was so drab that there wasn’t much from which to detract: a Londis supermarket; a chipper; a few pubs; a merchant chandlers, its window full of ropes and yellow oilskins: these, and a few other
undistinguished
establishments scattered along a straggling main street, with the houses painted in ice cream colours … yes, she thought, the fishy smell gave the place whatever character it had.

She took a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches from her pocket and lit up as she walked out along the pier, occasionally glancing back over her shoulder to see if the bus had arrived. Every so often she would stop and stand looking down into the few fishing boats moored there, taking in the texture of the thick, bright paint, the rough wooden duckboards on the decks, the plastic fishboxes. The trawlers were tied up to large iron rings which were pegged into the pier. She liked those rings, and always took note of them. She liked how the ring had cut its way into the stone over the years, for both metal and stone were hard, but the end result looked soft. Such greyness! The stone pier, the sky, the sea itself; only the cabins and hulls of the trawlers were bright, and the blue plastic fishboxes. It started to rain, that fine, penetrating, persistent rain that seems to come out of the air rather than to fall from the sky. It was the height of summer. She ground what was left of her cigarette under her heel. Glancing back, she saw the green bus draw to a halt.

In the huddle of tired passengers, she picked Nuala
out immediately, even though it was years since they had last seen each other. Claire couldn’t help smiling when she saw how Nuala was dressed, and had to hang back for a moment, trying to keep a straight face before going up to her. Nuala was wearing a dark-green oiled thornproof jacket. Evidently she had dressed for the country, and had thought that this was what everyone in Donegal would be wearing. Claire also was able to guess which items belonged to Nuala out of the pile of luggage the driver was unloading from the side of the bus. The co-ordinated tapestry cases stood out from the rest, from the battered holdalls and the Gola sports bags. Claire was a bit alarmed to see how much she had brought with her, even if she was staying until the autumn.

It took about half an hour to drive to where Claire lived. She could see the relief on Nuala’s face when she told her this. ‘It’s quite different out there,’ Claire told her. ‘Lots of fresh air.’

They drove out along the coast road. Claire would have admitted that the place where she had chosen to live was bleak, but she thought that it had its own magnificence too. It certainly didn’t have the lushness and prettiness people often expected to find in the countryside. To appreciate this area properly required a certain way of seeing things. Because of the wind coming in off the Atlantic, it was never static. Claire liked that about it, and she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone. The road ran high along the coast,
overlooking
headlands and small pale beaches. After a certain point it veered right and ran through a stretch of bogland, past cut stacked turf. The grass was grey there,
not green, grey against the rich dark brown of the cut earth. The grass looked dry, the peat was a moist brown …

Suddenly she remembered Nuala, who was sitting silently beside her. ‘Not too much further now,’ Claire said. Nuala nodded, but said nothing. After the bogland the land rose again, there was a scattering of coloured houses, and then they saw the sea again. There was a vibrant blue building with a name above the door and an ad for Guinness in the window; further on a little shop; on again and there was a white cottage, set back from the road. Shortly after that, the road simply ended, and near this point there was a small, grey, stone house. It stood on a headland, and the land rose steeply behind it. A short, hedgeless lane linked the house to the point where the road ran out. A narrow path continued on down to a cove sunk deep in the headland.

Claire lived in the grey stone house.

When people came to stay with her, it made her more alert to things than she might usually have been, so that she found herself looking at them as if it were also her first time there. What she noticed in town was the smell of the fish. What she noticed here, as soon as she got out of the car, was the air itself, the sharp freshness of the wind off the sea, mixing with the sweetish smell of peat smoke.

Throughout the journey Nuala had said very little, responding to the comments Claire had addressed to her, but asking no questions and voicing no opinions of her own. Claire wasn’t sure what was going on in her mind: was she shy, anxious, sulking? She had had a long journey, Claire remembered, she was probably tired.

She helped Nuala carry her luggage into the house, and showed her to her room. That was always a difficult moment. Some people would be clearly disappointed, or even shocked, by the austerity of the room in which they were to stay. But Claire didn’t mind this. What she found much worse were the people who gushed delight. She knew that they hated it far more than the people who made no attempt to hide their chagrin. Some visitors pretended to be ecstatic about the idea of staying in a stone house in the far west: waking in a room with a painted wooden ceiling and bare sanded floorboards, sleeping in a high, narrow iron bed, having no furniture but a
wardrobe
, a dressing table and a kitchen chair. With some people, even as Claire opened the door and showed them the room she could see that they were mentally calculating how long it would be before they could decently make their excuses and flee the spartan conditions.

Some people pretended to themselves as much as to Claire that they liked it, and for a week or two they did enjoy playing at the simple life: baking because it was the only way to get fresh bread; buying fish locally and gutting and cooking it; carrying in turf for the fire. The novelty would last, on average, about a week and a half. Claire always knew that the end was approaching when visitors started to talk about food a lot, particularly about their favourite restaurants. Soon after that, they would leave. Some of her guests, those to whom she was closest, would ask her frankly what possessed her to live in such a hole.

Nuala didn’t react at all when she saw the room. She simply nodded, and put her cases down beside the wardrobe.

‘The bathroom’s next door. Come downstairs when you’re ready, I’ll make some tea.’ Claire was moving away when Nuala said, ‘Can I see your studio first? I mean, can I see it now?’

Claire was surprised. She nodded, and led Nuala along the landing, pushed open a door. Nuala stepped inside and looked around. North light fell on the white walls, the stacked canvases, the old shoeboxes with labels describing their contents gummed to the lids, the squashed metal paint tubes. Everything was extremely neat and tidy. Nuala looked all around, and nodded. She walked over to the window, which overlooked the headland and the sunken cove. Out in the bay there was a small island, little more than an outcrop of rock, with a lighthouse on it. The sky was immense. Claire held the door wide, indicating that she wanted her out. ‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ she repeated.

Claire had finished her tea and was smoking her second cigarette when Nuala appeared. They sat together for a while. Claire felt ill at ease. ‘Do you want to ring Kevin?’ she asked, but Nuala said, ‘No. He’s to phone me this evening.’

Eventually Claire said, ‘I’m going out now.’ She stood up and put her cigarettes in her pocket. ‘I want to go for a walk. It’ll rain later.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Nuala.

Claire smiled. ‘It always rains later,’ she said.

AS SHE PUT ON HER ANORAK
, Claire wondered which direction she would take today. She decided to walk up behind the house to the cliffs, for she felt constrained, and wanted the height above the sea rather than the restricted are of the bay. She walked for about half an hour, until she was on a narrow sheep track, beyond which was a sheer deep drop to the sea. The ground was uneven, and she sat down in a curved depression which gave some semblance of shelter. The noise of the sea and the wind calmed her.

For some reason, Markus came into her mind. It was a long time since last she thought of him, and she didn’t know why she should suddenly find herself
remembering
him now, much less that particular day when they had sat together in a café in Germany, and he told her about his visit to Poland. Where was it he had been, Cracow or Lódź? She couldn’t remember now. He had been affiliated to an art college for six months and he had told her that when they showed him the accommodation provided it turned out to be in a building which had been a Nazi headquarters during the war. People had been tortured and killed there. Someone told him the interrogation rooms had been in the basement, in the
part of the building which had since been converted into showers for the students. On the façade of the building there was a marble plaque, a memorial to those whom the Nazis had killed there.

‘I took one look round the place,’ Markus said, ‘and I just knew that I could never live there. I couldn’t bring myself to live in a place where things like that had happened.’ He had found lodgings in an apartment in the city centre.

And did it matter so much,’ Claire asked, ‘what had happened there?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Markus said. ‘It mattered to me.’ He said that he could not live in a place where there had been such evil. ‘And you seem to be forgetting what nationality I am,’ he added coldly.

She remembered feeling embarrassed at that; feeling ill at ease too, talking of such things in the comfort of the café. It didn’t seem right to her. It had been Markus’s idea to go there. He took a childish delight in such places: the white coffee pots and the rich cream cakes, the dark wood of the bentwood chairs, the newspapers attached to bamboo frames: ‘It’s all so civilized,’ he would say, which annoyed Claire.

He could relax in such places, he was more open with her and would tell her honestly how he felt about things, such as how he hadn’t been able to bear the Halls of Residence. He said that sometimes he felt redundant as an artist, and that it was hard to be vilified, but harder still to be ignored. ‘People in Europe now aren’t interested in art because it has to do with death. It teaches you how to die, and people don’t want to know about that. In that way art is religious. There was always, until
this century, a distinction between things which were true art, connected with religion, and things which had a social function, which were decorative or for
entertainment
. Now we have only two divisions: money and entertainment. What matters is making money, and then you rest from that by being entertained with what people like to think of as art.’

The irony was that Markus was a successful artist, and at the time they met in the café, he had been
commissioned
to make a sculpture for a bank. He was confused by this: pleased but troubled. He told Claire he knew that when he was younger he wouldn’t have accepted such a commission. He said he still didn’t understand why they had asked him. On the one hand, he was appalled to find himself in the pay of such philistines. On the other he was relieved to have the money. ‘I’m not such a fool’, he said, ‘to think that people who go to the bank will see this work and suddenly they will
appreciate
it. I don’t believe in taking art to the people. If they want it, they will find it. If there are people who go to the bank who already have some appreciation of art, they may like the work I do, but those who are not interested will not be converted.’ He looked sad and wistful as he talked to her about this. He knew all about artistic integrity, and he felt that he was selling out. He reminded her of an adulterer who spoke sadly of how wonderful a woman his wife was, and how she did not deserve to be betrayed even as he continued to deceive her.

The waitress had come over then, and he had brightened up, taking out his wallet to pay for the coffee and cakes. Claire couldn’t imagine Markus without money:
not that he ever had a great deal, but he would never have less than enough, would never allow himself to slip into the precarious financial predicaments she often found herself in. The waitress, who was wearing a frilly apron, rummaged for change in the expanding leather wallet attached to her belt.

Claire had once visited a concentration camp. When she was in Munich, she had visited Dachau. She didn’t want to talk to Markus about it. It had been a strange experience to be there, not at all as she had expected. It left her feeling empty.

She had realized then how evil can affect a place, leaving not the sense of horror one might expect, but instead killing off all its spiritual energy and leaving it sterile. Dachau was a museum, spotlessly dean. There was a laundered prison uniform in a glass case, and she had watched a tourist take a photograph of it, against the light, with a simple camera. Claire knew that it wouldn’t come out properly. At best he would get a black, headless outline against a bright background. The
meticulous
care with which the exhibition was presented unsettled her. She found it more telling than the museum itself, and thought it wrong that it was the people who had perpetrated this terrible thing who now were explaining it. It was a false expiation. She had once seen a photographic exhibition of Dachau, as it now was, and the exhibition consisted of photographs of the signs dotted around the place: ‘This way’, ‘Turn right’, ‘No entry’, which the visitors were to follow obediently.

Markus put his change in his pocket. ‘How would you feel about living in a house where someone had killed themselves?’ she asked. He looked at her blankly. He
had obviously lost the train of the conversation. ‘Would you be able to live in a house like that?’

‘Of course,’ he said, realizing what she meant. ‘That wouldn’t be a problem, because there’s a difference between evil and suffering. I cannot tolerate a place where evil has been done, I tell you, I could not live in such a place. In whatever house people have lived, there will have been suffering, and happiness too, and if someone has gone so far as to kill themselves, then there has been extreme suffering. That I can accept, for I feel pity, not horror. To live freely and at peace in such a place is to show solidarity with the suffering of the past.’

Years had passed since that day which she now remembered, huddled on the clifftop. There were so few places left that were not steeped in blood, which you could say with certainty had not been the scene of some atrocity in the past. She liked this spot because she felt that it was not saturated with human experience in this way. She wondered where Markus was now, and what he was doing. It was years since she had seen or heard from him, and she regretted having lost contact with him. She had loved Markus.

The ground where she sat was turfy and springy. She leaned over a little tussock and examined it carefully, teasing out with her fingers the tiny plants of which it was composed, the mosses and the lichens. The
combination
of smaliness and complexity in the plants fascinated her. She put her head right down on the tussock as though it were a pillow, and closed her eyes, listened to the sea, the birds, the wind. She never regretted having come to live here. She opened her eyes and saw, inches from her face, a tiny spider scale a blade
of grass. Where was Markus now? She sat up and looked out over the ocean. Claire thought of the woman she had left back in the house, and hoped the period of time they were to spend together would go well. She wondered what Nuala was doing. Would she still be drinking tea? She imagined her sitting by the kitchen table, her hands around the teapot for warmth, looking out of the window at the headland which would be vividly green against the sky’s soft grey. Would she notice that? Claire knew already what she would find when she returned: the obscurity, as if a room could be flooded with darkness, just as it could be flooded with light. The dim warmth of her house suddenly seemed enormously desirable to her. Coming back here had been the right thing for her to do. She stood up and started to walk back.