I Live Here Now

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There seemed to be only two colours that day, the silvery grey-green of sea mist and sky, of the metal surface of the nuclear station and of the leaves of the buckthorn bushes, variously inflected and shifting in the light. Nobody drank there, but the first time we went a group of local musicians turned up with guitars and asked to join in. The audience is kept masked and distanced but more and more players are allowed on to the stage, and even a singer to sing Korngold’s Songs of Farewell: Der regen fällt. The ground about the bandstand is slightly raised and curved, like a cake, and the wide floor is covered with dry brown leaves that have been left to pile and rustle.

Yet it seems that only a complete surrender to the experience of these specific surfaces permits the displacement into other cities and other spaces that we crave. There is a Russian word that surfaces when I am writing to a friend in Moscow: Безвременье, Bezvremenye. After prolonged soaking in hot brine the swelling in my finger began to recede, but twelve days on there is still some numbness, the last pieces of thorn are still rising to the surface, tiny brown specks in the skin. Because I kept my eyes on the world, essential for safety and avoidance of oncoming objects (small wayward dogs a particular hazard), I couldn’t look at my paper as I drew, so the drawings were blind drawings with the occasional quick glance down at the drawing to see what was happening. The young man and woman who work here talk to me about how long they haven’t seen their siblings for, about the difficulty of travel, to home in Thessaloniki, to a brother working in Germany.There is a carpet on the floor, a sort of Persian carpet rather like the ones in the house where I grew up, and there is sunlight coming into the room, filtering through the weave of the curtains, that is to say through the brush strokes, and for the past twenty years when I was lying in my bed here this light would come in through the rough weave of my curtains, in just the same way, to fill up the space of my bedroom so that it became a day dream space, safe and encompassing, and so that I could almost see the traces of the two children in the room also, the boy and the girl, one sitting, one standing.

Instead I take cues from my surroundings; slowing to the rhythm of light, air and sound, trying to establish where I am in space through the echoes in the back court: the burr of wood pigeons and the soft melodic cough of the man in the flat below. Here, it was clear, on our street, there had been a failure of care — a blanketed stretcher brought out in the early hours of Christmas morning. I listen to lieder for the German words I know almost nothing of and read Prishvin’s diaries from Moscow in 1930, as he watches, and photographs, teams of workers destroying the vast church bells. Over the weekend, mindful of its magic powers, but above all of its taste, we helped ourselves to as much as we politely could of the glowing jam, spooning it over the grainy white cheese, the sour cream and black bread, and stirring it into our black tea, or rather, sipping the tea through a large spoon of the jam in the traditional way. The economy is described as “in hibernation”, a sort of deep freeze, from which it should emerge as fresh as peas.We exclaim a little at this bewildering card shuffle of years, of decades, of the incredible ages of our parents, and of our children. The building and its last active clinics has been closed for the week, as has my children’s school for the opening days. They are evidence of my lived experience moment to moment, the layering of marks recording the movement of my body when walking and the constant scanning of my vision as it alternates between a broad and narrow focus on all that I encounter.

The project was delayed last autumn when residents came out and stood in front of the diggers, and for now it is on hold.There is a large kite with tassels and a small girl running with a much smaller kite that rises up after her as she runs with its string. The players settle into their tunes and are brought tea, and glasses of whisky are offered to the elders.