The m1ss1on of the Center for Photography at Woodstock is to provide an artistic home for contemporary photographers with programs in education, exhibition, publication, fellowships, and services that create access to professional workspace, nourishing responses, arld new audiences. The Center acknowledgessupportfrom the New YorkState Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
STAFF: Executive Director, Colleen Kenyon; Associate Director, Kathleen Kenyon; Assistant Director, Lawrence P. Lewis; Program Assistant, Kate Menconeri. BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Sheva Fruitman, Rollin Hill, Kenro lzu, Colleen Kenyon, Ellen Levy, James Luciana, Tanya Marcuse, Elliott Meisel, Marc Miller, Jose Picayo, Lilo Raymond, Ken Shung, Alan Siegel. ADVISORYBOARD: orton Batkin, Ellen Carey, Philip Cavanaugh, Susan Ferris, Cheryl Finley, Julie Galant & Martin Bondell, Beth Gates-Warren, Howard Greenberg, Sue Hartshorn, Bill Hunt, Greg Kandel, Peter Kenner, Laurie Kratochvil, Peter MacGill, Ann Morse, Sandra S. Phillips, J. Randall Plummer, Ernestine W. Ruben, Kathy Ruttenberg, Julie Saul, Susana Torruella-Leval. SPRING '95 ARTS ADMINISTRATION
INTERNS: Judi Esmond, Heidi Woldt, Barbara Strnad. SUMMER'95 WORKSHOPINTERNS: Judi Esmond, Vanessa Holtgrewe, and Steven West.
PHOTOGRAPHYQuarterly #63, Vol. 16 No. 2, ISSN 0890 4639. Copyright © 1995 the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498. TEL 914 679-9957. FAX 914 679-6337. All photographs and texts repnxluced in chis Quarterlyare copyrighted by the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may he repnxluced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The opinions and ideas expressed in this publication do not represent official positions of the Center. PrintingbyKenner Printing Co. Inc., New York City. Editing and design by Kathleen Kenyon. Text proofreading by Joan Munkacsi. Composition by Digital Design Studio, Kingston, New York. The Quarterly is distributed by Bernhard De Boer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey, 0711 O;Desert Moon Peritxlicals, S:cincaFe, New Mexico; and Fine Print Distributors, Austin, Texas.
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CENTEREXHIBITIONS:July 29 - SeptemberI 7 Time, Memory, & the Limits of Photography, curator Ellen Handy, Artists: Dove Bradshaw, Jungjin Lee, Mikael Levin, Wojciech Prazmowski, Barbara Rosenthal, Paul Salamon; SOLO: David Hall. Se/Jtember30 - DecemberI 7: The Cultured Tourist, curator Leslie Tonkonow, Artists: Max Becher & Andrea Robbins, Joan Fontcuberta, Jeffrey Kane, Tseng Kwong Chi, Tim Maul, Vik Muniz, Andre Roiter, Beat Streu Ii, and Anne Turyn. Video as Cultural Tourism, curator Ardele Lister. SOLO: Richard Lopez, Jr.
Center galleriesare open, free co the public, Wednesday throughSunday,noon co 5 p.m.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editor's Introduction
Expanding Upon Passing Moments, Memory Traces, & Light Images
Biographies: Dove Bradshaw / Jungjin Lee / Mikael Levin/ Wojciech Prazmowski / Barbara Rosenthal / Paul Salamon
Btit
(book of days)
Coating a glass plate and draining excess collodion
Woodcut from Gaston Tissandicr's A
2
Ul~lH~ .'- . \ /
or
Time, Memory, & the Limits of Photography,
lll WH~~l~ Mount Everest ~llHI
Everything
"
• --
History
and Handbookof Photography,(New York, 1877)
INTRODUCTION
"a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket"
Like the white rabbit Alice sees -just before she falls into the well-
Ellen Handy presents contemporary artists who use photography in a curious manner. Handy's thesis, that "straight" photographs are not useful for some complex picture ideas, is one with which many may argue. But the author's proposal is clarified by the work seen in this issue of the magazine. Some may say "Oh dear! Oh dear!" but others may-like Aliceburn with curiosity.
Kathleen Kenyon, editor
t: Dove Bradshaw, plain air, installation, I989
We need to raise $25,000 to make our new Artists' space a reality. Please contribute. 3
6:
Paul Salamon, untitled, photographic sculpture, late 1980s
Proust was wrong; we can neither stop nor regain time, and this circumstance is a cornerstone of the human condition. Yet stopping time is what photographs have always, marvelously, seemed to do. As citizens of the late twentieth century, we can scarcely reach adulthood without accumulating our own photographic fossil-records of time, selected moments trapped in a medium that appears to endure long after the specimen that created it has decayed or disappeared. And we all know about how photography works through our own processes of memory, interrupting and re-emphasizing episodes in the smooth unrolling of time. Or do we? The photographic art stands ready to prompt and elicit new ideas and emotions about such complex transactions.
Though notorious for its attempts to stop time, photography has only recently been widely recognized as a means of changing events as they unfold. Garry Winogrand spoke of the effect of photography upon events, and any number of artists working today, such as Lorie Novak or Anne Turyn, ground their photographic practice in recognition that photographic images are the dominant partners in our dialogues with the past and with memory. As memory changes the past, so does photography change memory. Supposed truthful because of its uniquely indexical relation to the "real" world-its binary composition of light-sensitive particles either exposed or not-photography is in fact infinitely more persuasive and subjective than any previous form of visual fiction. Let us consider the limitations inherent in photography, memory, and time. Time is the simplest of the three. It is an arrow pointing in only one direction, a one-way street running from a lost point behind us toward a vanishing point at the horizon, where the comprehensible present meets the unimaginable future. The revelations of science are not of the slightest importance here. Human life is conducted exclusively in a pre-modern universe, and the only principle of relativity that we ever actually experience is a pre-Socratic one: the profoundly irrefutable Heraclitean insight that we can never step twice into the same river.
And memory? Its primary limitation is that once its operations begin, a process of distortion ensues which is contrary to the re-playing of experience. Memory is like a tape recording that is altered slightly each time we play it, and thus progressively diverges from original experience. It also deteriorates at a slower, steadier rate even when we do not play it. Such dual transformation works rather like a taxi meter, clicking away with the distance travelled when in motion, but also doing so when the taxi is stopped in traffic, at a different rate and in a different mode.
The limits of time and memory are ancient themes whose tropes are solidly established in all forms of cultural expression. But what of the limits of photography? These are poignant, not pathetic: an experimental opportunity and an impetus, not obstacles or disadvantages for the artists who explore them.
Though notorious for its attempts to stop time, photography has only recently been widely recognized as a means of changing events as they unfold.
4
Jungjin Lee The American Desert Series Ill, 1994, 201/,x77" (Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, NY)
When we listen, we hear speech, and we hear what is not said-the latter normally being more powerful. So too when we look at photographs. We see both what can be photographed and what cannot be photographed As Wallace Stevens put it, "I do not know which to prefer,/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes} The blackbird whistling/ Or just after." Photography reaches the frontier of the possible-an exciting territory where we notice how like life itself photography can be.
Photographers have ever been fascinated by the intersections with the frontiers of time and memory, and the limits of the medium We might think of the invention of moving pictures, resultant from the photographic researches of men like Muybridge and Marey, who sought to apprehend time itself as much as motion. Or we might go backward in photographic history still further and consider three celebrated images. There is, for instance, Daguerre's famous plate of the Parisian boulevard, mysteriously depopulated because of the great length of the exposure, during which crowds passed down the pavements and out of the picture before their forms could be recorded In this daguerreotype, caught like a fly in amber, is a solitary discernible figure of a man, evident because he paused at a street corner for the duration of a shoeshine. We might consider as well Bayard's self-portrait as a drowned man, a mock suicide enacted for the camera, an artificed memory, an attempt to insert a certain image or version of events into history And then there is O'Sullivan's photograph of an inscription left by Spanish conquistadors in a remote American desert in 1526. Arriving in the 187Os on a geological and geographical expedition, O'Sullivan trimmed away the encroaching yucca plants to photograph this historical record, carefully positioning a ruler to indicate scale. But the real instruments of measure here are camera, memory, and calendar, not the ruler. What is being measured is the passage of time and the ways in which humans inscribe themselves upon the world
William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, referred to the new medium as the "art of fixing a shadow"; that is, of recording transient effects of light to preserve ephemeral instants in time. From photography's inception, this has been its first task, and it is one whose necessity has endured over the ensuing 156 years, until today Photography has found its way into the very heart of public and private experience, as our newspapers and our family albums attest. Photographs have become the common coin of memory; they are also a standard [if a treacherous one) to which the subjective instrument of memory may appeal. But what are the functions of time and memory in photography today? How do contemporary photographers recognize the frontier where the temporal and the visual meet? And how do they seek to expand the horizons of their medium as they endeavor to address the unfolding of time and memory in their work? What unconventional materials, formats, and tech-
How do contemporary photographers recognize the frontier where the temporal and the visual meet?
HANDY
Barbara Rosenthal Six Houses on the Horizon, (derail) 1995, 24xl52" 5
niques have become appropriate vehicles for artists' ambitions?
Using snapshots and media images to stimulate memory and to mark time is a common practice in everyday life, but how do photographers use the passage of time and the operation of memory in their work? This is a question that might have any number of different answers, depending upon the exemplars chosen. The creations of the six photographers discussed in this essay share this theme, and share a distance from 1980s-style post-modernism. More artful and less polemical than the work which characterized the first wave of post-modern photographic practice, this is photography for the end of this century and for the beginning of the next. These photographers (unlike the self-proclaimed "artists who use photography" of the last decade) are notably in harmony with the traditions of the photographic medium. Yet Dove Bradshaw 1 Jungjin Lee1 Mikael Levin1 Wojciech Prazmowski 1 Barbara Rosenthal 1 and Paul Salamon all make photographic objects, projects, or constructions that diverge considerably from the venerable style of modernist, so-called straight photography. While their work may not "look like" photographs, they do fundamentally affirm the richness, multiplicity, and invention that are the essence of photography.
These photographs don't necessarily look like memories. Resemblance is not at issue here, but identity is. Among these photographers' inventions are those that are made of the very stuff of memory and time themselves, rather than being a mere attempt to depict them. To Roland Barthes, photography was intimately and inevitably connected with death, loss, and absence. This is true enough in his rhetorical sense, and not at all necessarily true in other terms. Photography can be understood as standing on the side of life itself; naturally, life necessarily implies death-but what of it? Birth implies death too, but we are well able to differentiate between the two in practice. There is ample latitude in which photographic artists may work, other than in the precincts of mortality. That which finally eludes the photographer's grasp as she or he attempts to encompass time and memory may be described as life itself, not the finality of death.
In addition to the photographs, several texts are gathered here. This essay describes a context of thought into which certain photographic artists may be drawn. Liz Waldner 1s poems are a kind of improvisational writing that acts as analog to the work of these six photographers. Her poems (like their work) are made of the complex loop of time, experience, and memory which photography enters and exits in the course of individual experience, and of the wider historical sphere as well. Alexei Bayer 1s story works in a different way, as a chronicle of the manipulation of experience through time, memory and a photograph. This story comments on these phenomena, though as fiction it does so more gracefully and obliquely than an essay can do. Poems and a story do their work well here-they limn the limits of critical writing, just as Bradshaw, Lee, Levin, Prazmowski, Rosenthal, and Salamon press against those of photography.
As poetry and fiction have here become the means of discussing time, memory, and photography, so have stone, light, paper, silver, words, old photographic images, grids, painterly emulsion, gesture, and idea become the means and materials by which images are assembled. These six individuals' photographic works are quite dissimilar. Photographs notoriously bring together all that is disparate in reality-far places, past moments, unrelated fragments-just as memory is the web with which we weave continuity from unassimilably distinct experience, and just as time is the matrix of all consciousness. Is it not then appropriate to collect here a group of photographs that may never be reunited?
E L L E N H A N D Y has written for Arts Magazine and for issues of the Quarterly (summer 1993, fall 1991, summer 1991 ). Her essay, "A Life as More than the Sum of its Parts, and Photography as One of Them," was published in the Center's 1994 Manuel Komroff catalog Keys to Unlock the Heart. In 1995, Handy will be an Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography (New York, New York). A C K N D W L E D G M E N T 5: I want to offer thanks to the staff at the Center, who worked very hard to make this show happen. Alexei Bayer and Liz Waldner are superb collaborators whose texts embellish this project to a rare degree; Alexei and Andrea Bayer also diligently and generously abetted this project in other, more practical ways; and each of the artists involved has been cheerfully cooperative, as have Pace MacGill Gallery and Jackson Fine Arts.
Bradshaw's repetition and extension of ideas over time resembles memory's ceaseless reshaping of experience.
6
Dove Bradshaw pages 6 & 7 plain air, 1989, installation: four pigeons, two bicycle wheels, two canvas nests, two zen archer's targets, two bowls, one water bowl
ALEXEI BAYER
She too had a brush with happiness once.
It was in late fall, the time of year when the air in their neighborhood turned crisp and a little astringent from the smoke of many chimneys. One evening five or six months into her marriage she happened to look at her wedding picture on the night table and was powerless to hold back tears.
She had come into the bedroom to get something-a pair of scissors, a bathrobe, it didn't matter what. The photograph, in its antique silver frame, stood on James' side.
Glancing at it distractedly at first, she stopped and took a second look. It was as if she was seeing it closely for the first time. So much white there. A diaphanous veil over a halo of blond curls. A lace-trimmed wedding dress ebbing from her bare shoulders, revealing the semicircular promontories of her full, corseted breasts. Specks of baby's breath among pale roses.
A very beautiful woman, laughing. A tall, graceful man at her side, smiling encouragingly: he takes such visible pleasure in her happiness. The picture is posed, but the sincerity of, their er:ootions makes it seem spontaneous.
Looking at herself was, for a moment, like looking at a stran,ger. Her wedding picture was like a window into someone else's wonderful life. 'The eye wants to linger in it, to stray beyond the edge~of the frame.
Who is this woman? Can it really be me? ,;,
"Valentina?" • '\'-
James stood in the_ doorway. Behind him was the half-ligh; of their"•living room, the SIJf: ~low of the fireplace, his gentle, 1naud1ble Chopin. ;; •!' ·, "Your tea is getting cold-Valentina?" " z z -< >!'3(, z., f"'0 ?"·-· "\ ,...
He stepped into the bedroom, suddenly worried • , ~'ff. t t .....,_ .
"Are you okay?" \ ; ; •~ • \ \\
She sobbed, saying nothing. , , ' ' '1 \ he;C~;:
::~~~h~~::~:::::: :e: 7 ~houldec She had been ccying (o?lo,n:i~:~~t
She lifted her face toward him: "No, darling. Nothing's the matter with me." ~• 0 / f
He stroked her tear-stained cheek, her hair, and she added: "It's just I'm so ljappy'' 1 i/4 4
covec arnund
That night, she lay awake late, warmed and excited 6y her happiness. The silence OLftside\vas extraordinary: the impenetrable absence of sound of a well-to-do American suburb. Next to her, James.bfeatr1ed evenly, like a healthy child. She was sleepless, but she forced herself to lie still, careful not to disturb hlPn,.,~e w~pted to be alone, one on one with this feeling. She. was happy-genuinely happy-perhaps for the first time..,in her life.
On the wedding picture, her happiness was, after all, counterfeit. Whatever it seemed like now, to an outside observer, she herself couldn't be fooled. What passed for happiness was something ef~e-triumph.
Over James? No, James was the vehicle, the unwitting deus exmachina, the secret weapon of her triumph. Her triumph was over last winter. / ,.,_,.
The thought of last winter made her shudder, and she wrapped herself deeper into her half of the down comforter. To keep the freshness of the air and the pmell of burning firewood in the room, she insisted on sleeping with a window open, under thick covers. "This is what I get for marrying a Russian," James joked mornings, sprinting from the bed into a hot shower.
Last winter was dampness and fog and filthy gray steam seeping through manhole covers on the streets of New York City. Late nights flowing into stale, irritable late mornings. Last winter was the Kavkaz, Mitya the barman, and Inga's cold-water walkup in the theater district.
One evening not too long ago, driving the car into the city, parking it in a lot, and having dinner with another couple at a droll ethnic restaurant before the play, Valentina was amazed at how different a place could seem It was James's theater district. She would have been charmed by its bright lights, laughter, and good perfumes, but she knew that it was all as thin as a poster. Poke a hole through it and stare into the dark void Last winter, Valentina's theater district was her particular vision of hell.
The Kavkaz was in the theater district, at the intersection of James's and hers.
It was a basement restaurant in a row of other basement restaurants. It had walls of faded purple plush, and in the emptines 9 of early evenings, before the dinner crowd began to gather, it smelled of disinfectant and mildew. It
•
:::"f
ilbed
20
served an assortment of Russian and Mideastern dishes, and for that reason it was called the Kavkaz, or the Caucasus. Inga, who had a way with words, called it Kafka's-a subtle mockery of Mitya's Azeri accent and as apt a nickname as a place could ever be given.
Kafka's had a main dining room, where the serious patrons usually sat. The dining room patrons were young, selfconfident, dressed in Armani suits. They worked on Wall Street, were lawyers for big firms or else American-trained doctors. They made plenty of money. They came into the restaurant after the theater or before a movie. They spoke English among themselves and to their wives, who too were mo~tly Russian-born. When forced to speak their native tongue, they butchered its grammar and used English words and expressions: "car," "I love it," "second mortgage."
Behind the bar, on the way to the restrooms, was another .space-a smaller and dingier one. What it had been in the old days was hard to tell; with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a very useful employment was unexpectedly found for it.
In late afternoon, around four-thirty or five o'clock, it began to fill with women. They were dressed with care, if on the slightly garish side, and wore lots of makeup. Blondes predominated, and most were good-looking. They were in New York on expired tourist visas, but that was nobody's business.
The women lounged about the bar, coddling their vodka tonics and smoking long, thin cigarettes. After five, the first men began to arrive. Older, balding, and less successful than the dining room set, these men came in outmoded polyester-blend suits or in youthful sweaters clinging to their substantial bellies. Their English was poor and heavily accented, but so, by now, was their Russian. They too said "train," "drink," and "draivat"-for the verb "to drive."
These men were single. They stopped off at Kafka's after work, on the way to their dreary bachelors' dwelling in Brooklyn, Queens or Jersey City.
The young women and older men sat at the bar or around shaky, pseudo-intimate tables around it. They broke up into couples; some formed just for the evening, others recreated themselves several evenings in a row. Their talk seemed amicable enough, but in reality they were engaged in a very complex game. On the woman's side, the purpose of the game was to get a proposal of marriage and, along with it, the coveted work permit and, eventually, the green card. The man, meanwhile, played for bedding the woman without marrying.
It was a highly formalized contest, something like an eighteenth-century minuet. After a popular movie, Inga dubbed it Expatriate Games.
Mitya the barman lorded over the bar. The regulars among the men greeted him with a familiar slap on the shoulder: a bond with him somehow made them bar patrons, not participants in the Expatriate Games-which had a whiff of shamefacedness about it. To them, Mitya responded with a cool nod. He was on the lookout for those who were bashful or new to the scene, whorn he took under his wing.
The women, the illegals, depended on Mitya: most of them being unemployed and virtually penniless, he gave them their first drink for free, on the house. After that, the rule was, you had to find yourself another sponsor if you wished to continue drinking. The rule also was that you didn't cross Mitya if you wanted to have a future at Kafka's.
Inga alone could sometimes cross Mitya, but Inga was a special case. She was a veteran. Not very attractive and, worse, cynical and sharp-tongued, she had almost no hope of scoring a win in the Expatriate Games. She was also an ugly drunk with little control over herself after a third or fourth vodka. On many nights she ended up throwing in the towel, appearing next morning back at their apartment, bloated and hungover, to change hastily for work.
In Inga's language, those nights of defeat were known as falls. Besides Expatriate Games, Inga had another name for what they were doing over at the restaurant. She called it mountain climbing: "We're in the Caucasus, scaling the summit."
"If you see that I'm falling," she reproached Valentina, "you've got to keep me on the face of the mountain. Dr else, we go down together, like true mountaineers."
That was supposed to be a joke, but it was never said in a jocular tone.
When she first got to Kafka's, Valentina was climbing the summit on two sides at once. She was going with a middle-aged bookkeeper and with a youngish, romantically misty-eyed computer programmer. She played them against each other.
'Juggle them and they get their heads knocked together," Inga instructed her when they met. "More certain this way."
Inga offered Valentina a couch in her apartment, almost rent-free. The apartment was small, untidy, and on a horrific block. But it wasn't far from Kafka's.
"Crash for a while," Inga said with a shrug, "I don't care. Anyway, you won't linger there long."
Because of her flawless English, Inga was able to get a job-illegally-with a Russian trading company in midtown. She could afford to be generous. It was because of Inga's English that Valentina met James. But that was later. Valentina had been staying with relatives on her father's side in Queens. It was more fun with Inga. Anyway, she
21
wasn't going to linger there long.
Then, disaster struck.
The computer programmer went back to Kiev on a visit and fell head-over-heels in love. He didn't even have the decency to stop irito Kafka's to report the good news to Valentina. She had to find out through a friend of his.
While the programmer was away, it came out that the bookkeeper had not been playing the game straight. Not only was he already married, but he had a teenage son attending Baruch College.
As they say in Russia, misfortune doesn't travel alone. One night soon after, Valentina was attacked on the dark, foul-smelling staircase of Inga's tenement. They got her purse, which only had a few dollars in it, but in the scuffle she got pushed down the stairs and broke her ankle.
She had no health insurance, of course. A friend of a friend, a Russian-trained doctor without an American certificate, set the bone and made a homemade cast. The fracture healed well, but after the cast was removed Valentina continued to walk with a noticeable limp. That limp turned out to be a fatal setback at Kafka's: no one wanted a lame wife.
She sat at the bar, stretching her nightly vodka tonic ration as long as possible. She could only laugh bitterly as another newcomer, taken at first with her good looks, scampered off whenever she slipped off the bar stool to walk to the lady's room.
At Kafka's, men could come as long as they wished, but women had a set shelf life. It was different for everyone, and some, like Inga, managed to hang on for years. But, inevitably, a time would come when one felt that Kafka's was not going to be the answer to one's particular §_et-of-pPoblems. For those who failed, there were two exits: one lateralback to Russia-and another downw 9rd;~f.9o~af:J<cl··~,gaudieG~swe~tier clones in Brighton Beach. The latter, for most, was just the intermediary stage ,,i • Valentina's limp went aw -.....:__ • . The egulars paid her no attention: she was beautiful, it could r;i if no one had taken her yet. Why be a fool? , •
Mitya at first grew di~ 11l7n drinks to other women. Even Inga began to look I g/er long.
Still, Valentina hesitat'
And then, suddenly, bh that night and straggled from his dinner companions. Somehow, into~S:~onve r)dry,,wit appealed to him. They bantered on, while Valentina sat t. their"::ta uch 'situations, James was amused by Inga but hit on her better-looki • ,.Y•_./
That night, it was V Pn to f n~, tir:-hply from the dreariness of her situation. Who cares any more? w 'B"r'e i~"rT)cinths' time? In a month?
James took her to 1s apar:, rnent in the East ad§ love all night.
In retrospect, it was •st~ove she ~ol./,lp1.h gness to sleep with him without any preliminary ritual, which would hav. ed o'ff,_fh -t/r't..Jdis.h,lo , expatriates, appealed to him tremendously.
They went through a' od of fo~mal eng&gemerl ·, ___.. ugh. she had already moved in with him. The wedding took place in a small town outside Philadelphiawffere James grew up and where his widowed mother still lived. The minister had known James as a boy.
"How wonderful she looks." James's sister said in the bathroom, while Valentina was adjusting her hair. The remark was made ostensibly to Inga but was meant for the bride.
Inga shot Valentina a quick glance in the mirror and smiled a stiff, mirthless smile.
"She looks like she's just climbed Mount Everest."
II
Next day, after James had gone to work, Valentina transferred her wedding picture from his night table into the top drawer of hers. The picture radiated so much happiness she didn't want it squandered into the thin air.
Ill
"Valentina?"
The noisy implement James was using to blow the leaves off their lawn had been silent for a while. He was at the far end of their property, talking to somebody.
"Could you come down here for a moment, love?"
Valentina waved to them from the kitchen window. She turned down the flame, removed the apron, and ran down into the yard through the back door.
_.___.,..,.,,~
r
22
She was in the process of preparing a Russian dish of cabbage stuffed with chopped ·meat. Ever since they moved into their new house, with its spacious kitchen, fancy utensils, and hi-tech stove, she had developed a passion, and indeed a talent, for Russian cooking. She especially enjoyed making elaborate meals on weekends, while James worked around the house or in the yard. Physical work, he said, was a_pleasure after a sedentary week at the office.
It was a cool fall day. The air smelled of decaying leaves. In the autl!mnal suburban stillness, a couple of daws harangued each other in the upper branches of a pine tree.
Valentina crossed the lawn toward the two men. The grass uoder her feet was soft and lush despite the lateness of the season.
"Yes, darling?"
"I want you to meet John Bohrweiter," said James. "Mr. Bohrweiter is our neighbor."
Valentina had a difficult time with American surnames. She could never understand them on the first try, and even when she thought she could, they turned out very different when seen in writing. She worked hard to remember them, especially since James had a fantastic number of friends: from his prep school, from college, from the law school, from work, and from God knows where else.
"On Saturday, we're going to the theater with the Ogilvies," he would say, and she, not wishing to appear rude by not knowing who the Ogilvies were, had to wait until Sa!:urday' to find out.
Mr. Bohrweiter gave Valentina a firm, frie1;1aly hanashake.
':Jack," he corrected James. • 'f-
Mr. Bohrweiter-Jack-was a slen_de~ man of medi,urn height, dresse_d in a pair;;..of gray trousers and a blue shirt. His thinned-out white hair was tarted n§ltfy on thkilside R~wore dark-rim1-i;ed tortoise-shell glasses; his eyes behind the severity of the frame~ ~!lre serenely blue and sparkled wi;h good ch'eer as he looked at Valentina.
"Welcome to New Kensington, Mrs. Smith.'-
'You can call me Valentirna. Or Valya." 1 @
':Jack has been to Russia, love," said James.
"Yes, indeed. I've gone there on business once or twice. a J He laughed. ' ' ' V
"You said it very well,Wsaid Valentina. He laughed again. "That meant I aon't speak Russian," he explained to James. James nodded.
~-~':,f•, ";~,, ,:/'', both. I'm sure you'll enjoy New Kensington. Nora and I would like you tof .,
"Well," said Jack. "It's very rn'ice to meet y' come over to our house for a drink sometime soon. We oughta revive- the custom of properly welcoming new people h " : to t 1s town. ~?
For a man of his age, he~had a light, eneRgetiG st8 Befo~;)~nteri~g his hoti§~. he tumed around and waved to them. "'
In the weeks that followed the Bot)rweite~~~Jack and Nora-became:their best friends in the neighborhood. It was because of James, no doubt Valentina had nbged hisijlility to'9ttract people, tdiefrie~d them quickly. There was a genuine warmth about him-especially in social situatfons. =~
As Jack had promised, the Bohrweiters soon invit~d them over for cocktails. A week later they returned the invitation and had Jack and Nora to dinner, with Valentina making one qf her childhood favorites, the spicy Georgian chicken. After dinner they sat around the table until almost eleven, drinking wine and decaf espresso and talking. Jack had travelled extensively, especially in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He had a raconteur's gift, relishing the act of telling a tale. Valentina couldn't always follow his punchlines, which were sometimes as fast as rapier thrusts, but she joined the others in their laughter because it was so infectious.
Afterward, Valentina and James walked their guests back to their house under a dark, cold, star-filled sky.
The Bohrweiters were much older than they, and so was almost everyone else in their part of New Kensington. After a while Valentina began to recognize many of her other neighbors. People were extremely polite and cheerful, and everybody said hello whenever she ran errands in town, such as mailing overweight letters to Russia.
IV
The trees shed their last leaves, and the weather turned colder. Valentina mostly stayed in New Kensington. The exception was the few times when she took an afternoon train into Grand Central, to visit Inga. After Valentina's wedding, the two of them had grown apart. Inga's cynicism and pessimistic outlook now grated on Valentina. Their lives were different; the pauses in the middle of their conversations began to lengthen.
Just before Thanksgiving, Jack and Nora gave a cocktail party.
"We thought we'd help everybody get into the holiday spirit," said Nora. "Plus, it'll give the two of you an opportunity
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to meet some of the people in the community you haven't yet had a chance to meet."
At the party Jack navigated among strangers with considerable ease, introducing himself and Valentina and making small talk: "We're new to New Kensington. Yes, it's a nice little town. No, my commute isn't really very hard." He made sure she wasn't excluded from the conversation. However, he soon became a center of a group of grayhaired lawyers, and they began to talk about cases they had been involved in and people they had worked with. Valentina listened for a while and drifted away unnoticed.
"Enjoying yourself?" Jack came up behind her holding two wine glasses, one in each hand. Handing one to her, he said: "I saw you weren't drinking. But then again, I always tend to put my foot in my mouth. Perhaps there is a reason for it."
He laughed. He had very precise diction when he spoke to her, enunciating every word with deliberate clarity. "I wanted to ask you something," he resumed after a short pause, growing more serious. "During one of my trips to the former Soviet Union, I brought back a wooden chess set. It is a very fascinating set, nothing like I have seen before. They told me that it came from one of the old republics. I wonder if you could tell me which one."
"I don't know anything about chess," said Valentina.
"I would like to show it to you. There is actually a label, but it's in Russian and I can't read it."
"Okay. Let's look." ~--r -~--.____
The party was held in the glassed-in te ra,ce in the q96~of the hou~e:'T-h~re, the fire was dancing in the fireplace "
and a small bar was set up in the czor,n·er,attende~~- y a whit!;l-'i::6ated oarte. aer. There was no place to sit, and the '\. ___,_ I\ 'guests stood around in groups, tall<ing and lauggin9,.,. ; , \ "-
Jack and Valentina went i ~lea~ing aside at the door to let her into the living room. The Bo bigg~r, fmµc I tantial than James's and Valentina's. ·." \ j / ,,,- _)",..·
The chess set was fr y to,tell-._ den box that doubled as a chess board said so. T ~rint~d ary Communist rubles. "It's a nice set," said ' rved an1d g I ' . I
But Jack, it seemed,/., ,f lR , " : "j' I /. "I wanted to tell you/sp~~1bihg," he saia. 1 • \ "What?" I .'f 1 \ // / /!
"I h. k • f ' /V1 I f 'I' ' .I t In we may hav 1 rmiet In• osco\{V. n act,' m / / ::1don't rem~mber," 1 d, f9_okingciwax. j_ , . /. / . .
This wouldn t especJ_.·,a prise me. Theli'e 'l,ike_9'18In y,our life than women like you in mine." /- /~: /
There was a chang; 1 s no 19 ger eyes hardened behind their prescription lens _ f \ / Valentina groped for rn''Her-po _____,_ it it. at her smoking but said nothing. She inhale t it 1 1 out in a thin, 1 .alt/a fa~e him "So?" 1. \ ¥/ t I
There was now a ch 9 •o. She yvas no longer beau " _/'iD~ened her features. She was, suddenly, like a stray dog that h 1 ,cked"lack(og_ strength tb attack'~b~~wling, dangerous on the defensive. "So,' said Jack. He wJsn t the one to baci<.'d~nlf sheo~stled..."M(;)seo~he bar at the National? Late February or early March, 1881? Rerilember me?" -----~' ---···
"Who could remember you all? There were so many of you bastards." She looked for an ashtray and, not finding one, flicked the ash onto the floor. "Frankly," said Jack, "I didn't think you would. But I had to be sure."
Valentina finished her cigarette in silence.
"Let me get rid of it for you," said Jack. "Before you burn down my house." He was his own self again-at ease. He took Valentina's cigarette from her hand, put it out in a flower pot, and left the stub on the windowsill.
Valentina distrusted the change, the quick cessation of hostilities. "So," she asked hoarsely. "What now?"
Jack shrugged. "Nothing."
"Are you going to tell James?"
Jack burst out laughing: "Are you kidding? It's not done in New Kensington. You're our charming new Russian-born neighbor now. Besides, I'd have to tell Nora, wouldn't I, if I tell James?"
There were footsteps in the corridor.
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"It's going to be our little secret," Jack whispered. He grabbed her hand and gave it a quick squeeze, to which she - didn't respond.
"Valentina?"
James was standing in the doorway "I've been looking all over for you. You shouldn't be smoking in the house." "It's all right," said Jack. "I've borrowed your wife to show her a chess .set I brought from Russia. Like all Russians, she seems to know quite a lot about chess."
VWinter brought cold and abundant snowfall. January was particularly relentless: it snowed almost every night, and James got up before light to shovel the driveway. He came into breakfast radiant, red-cheeked, frozen sweat in his hair.
The cocktail party at the Bohrweiters, if anything, heightened Valentina's happiness. It was so brittle, impermanent: in no time at all it could slip through her fingers.
Without saying a word about it after the party, it was as though the husband and wife had reached a silent understanding on the Bohrweiters. Never again did the subject of their next-door neighbors come up between them. Valentina saw Nora once in mid-January, at the dr;ug store in town; Nora started toward her with a broad smile, but Valentina gave her a vacant look and turnecf'?tway'" -
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VI
It was a strange winter. When March came, the wind changed vvi d began to blow from the south. It brought a swath of heavy, low-slung clet'.icis. The rain began-copi II on the snow, first beating it to a sugary glaze over the ground and then washing patches of it aw long-concealed landscape began to emerge: the gray grass on the lawn, the gray asphalt on the ro trunks, their bark sodden black.
One night in late Marc Valentina • ge sensation. She wasn t qui ep Y.ed nor was she fully awake, but was lying in bed in a state of drea sness. Suddenly, it occut'h h • man lying next to her was a stranger, not Ja es. \.
They rarely touched one e
many \ebple marr • ly twenties, they slept apart, each wanting a little privac of personal space.
She passed her hand over James s arm,· 1 at first, then more persis rowled in his sleep. His voice was low, hoarse, unfamiliar.
" - • Valentina leapt out of bed and switched o~ the lamp on her night table.-_ " "What's the matter?" asked James, raising n'is head from the-piU9~. -s-uinting. "What time is it?"
He stared at the electric alar clock, uncoftiprehending.
s "' "What's going on? Please, Val,ia, I must ge' arly, tomorrow:·"',:;
The feeling of a strange~\ bei g in t ' ~v:r quite leff. nightmare: a man wandering t~rougl;i m\(lg_ up softl
again she had a recurring "'m, lying down in their bed, in the empty space beside her. '\
One Sunday in April they sat down_ to an e r y dinner. She still enJq)'. p ing Russian meals on weekends, but on Sundays they now had to eat early becau~e James had begun to do office work on Sunday evenings, in preparation for the week ahead. He had built an office space"in the basement, where he didn't like to be disturbed.
He sat at the table with a towel wrapped around his neck, having just taken a shower after an afternoon jog. "I've made your favorite dish, darling," she said, stirring the pot on the stove, picking up a plate.
"Which one?" he asked, without much curiosity.
"What do you mean, which one? Beef stroganoff, of course. Over buckwheat, just as you like it."
He shrugged. "Not over buckwheat, Valya. You know I don't eat buckwheat."
Valentina stared, dumbfounded. A stranger's face stared back at her through James's features.
Their anniversary was in June. She wanted a quiet evening at home, but James insisted they go out. She yielded, and they ended up at the Caucasus.
The place had changed considerably over the past year. There had been, unfortunately, a fire, the elegant new maitre d' explained, and the old Caucasus was destroyed. Gone were the plush walls and the dingy chairs. The new Caucasus was rebuilt in a cool, brightly lit modern style. It had much individuality and designer whimsy, which made it indistinguishable from so many other New York restaurants. The dining room was on an upraised platform, overlooking the enlarged, and also brightly lit, space around the bar.
But the bar was empty except for a middle-aged neighborhood drunk and a young couple-none of them Russian. The Expatriate Games were over: back home, in Russia, crazy money was being made, and a woman with looks and
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guts could do incomparably better there than here in New York, married to some unloved computer programmer.
Behind the bar Mitya the Azeri barman was in the midst of all the elegance like a piece of old furniture that someone had neglected to take down to the curbside dumpster.
"He's a part-01,Nner now," whispered the maitre d'.
Mitya came over to their table and kissed Valentina's hand respectfully, almost deferentially. "Your anniversary, eh?" he said. They were speaking English in front of James, and Mitya's English had the same Azeri accent as his Russian. "Pease accept a bottle of champagne from the house."
"And Inga?" asked Valentina. They had completely lost touch after New Year's. "Have you seen her recently?"
Mitya shook his head.
"Where is she? Do you know?"
Mitya shrugged. "Who knows? They don't send me postcards, you see." He went back to the bar.
"Who's Inga?" asked James.
"She's the girl who introduced us. The one you started talking to first."
James pondered it over.
"Sorry, Valya. I don't recall her."
"She was even at our wedding." o1:i.
James shook his head. "No."
"But how could you not?" began Valentina,. but bit J,er tongue.
In the car, on the way home, she sat silently in the passenger seat. When they were approaching home, he asked:
"Are you asleep?"
"No," she replied. "I was just thinking."
"What?"
"You have a sister, right? No brothers?"
"No brothers. Why?"
"Nothing. I sometimes think that'"l'm losing' my mind." ,. ~.
She was not surprised that the stranger within James began intri.Jcling on their love-making. Sometimes, as they were making love, she felt drops of his hot saliva fall on he shoulot2 That may have been new, or else she simply ·i. .,,.,lj•, hadn't noticed it before-she couldn't tell. That impatient, peremptq_ry: side of.him wasn't much different from the men she had met in the past at the hard cbrr{3nQy bar·ofthe'-<HoteLN~tional. They paid, they had their fun, and that was sometimes better than Rwssian men a_ndsometi.111es"nf)t. She lay @otionless, lett.ing him do to her as he pleased. She thought of Jack Bohrweiter making love·to 0Nora Bohrweiter'in his big st;tely ho(Js~j:16\/Jnthe street from theirs. She didn't remember him, but he wasn't hard-to"i~vision: competent, bL-Jsinesslike,witt:i'si:rong hands despite his age, l .k I " ¼ i0 ~"; J
1 e a mo e.
VI I
One day a year or so later, looking for something gr ~ther, in,the bedroom, sh_e.chanced to open the top drawer of her night table. She had not done so for a v'o(hile.1
The thing she was looking for wasn't there. The dra~er·yv~ 1 sempty except for"'a picture in an antique frame. The
silver of the frame had oxidized, becoming nearlyJcll§ck,, The're was 1§•-tnick layer of dust over the glass.
She took the picture out. "
"It's a good picture of James and me," she thought, brushing the glass clean. "I wonder why I've been keeping it in a drawer?"
A L E X E I B A Y E R heads his own economic consulting firm, KAFAN FX Information Services, which provides weekly foreign exchange analysis for several electronic news services. He also writes articles on business and finance and contributes to MarketP/ace, the National Public Radio business program. Born in Russia in 1856, Bayer has lived in the U.S. since 1875. A story from his collection Wasps' Nest and Other Stories will be published by the Kenyon Review. The book is set in Moscow in the late 186Os-early 187Os. The author currently is at work on two other collections of short stories and a post-Cold War thriller. Bayer won first prize in the Hamptons Poetry Contest in 1887 and special honorary mention in Gypsy Magazine's Amnesty International competition in 1888. His translation of A.N. Ostrovsky's Artists & Admirers was staged by the New Theater in Brooklyn. Mr. Bayer lives in Manhattan with his wife, Andrea, an art historian at the Metropolitan Museum, and Jenny, a wirehair dachshund. The writer's free time is taken up with playing hockey at the Lasker Rink in winter and Sky.rink year-round.
(Globe illustrations from Leading Facts of Geography, 1811 and Primary Geography, 1884 by Alexis Everett Frye.)
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