Deborah Levy
Heresies
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This story by Deborah Levy originally appeared in the April/May 1985 edition of The London Magazine.
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i.
A man walked out into the Dutch dawn with sixteen candles burning on the rim of his hat. He took out his easel and began to mix colour. He painted the light and the candles burned with him.
An expert on art appointed by the state walked the polished corridors of a gallery selecting paintings to serve the state. He stopped abruptly in front of this painting and demanded the artist be interrogated by the Chief of Police. The Chief of Police typed out a report of this interrogation in which the artist is claimed to have said: ‘I allowed light to change the perceived notion of things.’ The artist was sent to a mental asylum where he remained for three years and on his release shot himself in a field throbbing with sunflowers.
Years later another man wrote of this artist: ‘He was a man suicided by society.’ The other man wrote this from a mental asylum where he remained on and off for sixteen years. During his time there he wrote plays for the theatre in which he demanded ‘light be used to evoke delirious emotions’ and countless essays which were only published after his death when he became a cult martyr. He also grafittied every possible wall in the asylum with things like ‘TRYING TO DEFINE US IS LIKE TRYING TO BITE YOUR OWN TEETH’ … ‘ALTHOUGH YOUR INFORMATION IS INCORRECT I DO NOT VOUCH FOR IT’ … ‘A BANKER WILL ONLY LEND YOU MONEY IF YOU CAN PROVE YOU DON’T NEED IT’.
A cleaning woman was sent at regular intervals to dissolve the grafitti with a specially-prepared solution.
She lies there and wonders whether she loves or hates him.
Fifty years later a young woman takes her washing to a Turkish launderette in a broken part of East London. The walls are mosaiced with hundreds of tiny coloured stones, woven here and there with jagged pieces of shimmering mirror. Outside, the streets are wet, scattered with litter and small shops open for Sunday trading. The door opens on an ornate Turkish Tramp King carrying a small basket and battered radio. He shuffles in and sits down. A golden diamantéd crown sits on his coarse grey hair and small jewels entwine his beard. They are shaped like eyes. His robes are elaborate and filthy, layers and layers of chiffon, cotton, wool and satin, various lengths and textures. Outside, the chip shop is opening its doors and a queue of pale-skinned, round-shouldered people clutching purses and smoking cigarettes clamber to get out of the rain. The Turkish Tramp King seems to enjoy the rhythm of the washing machines, rocking to and fro, sometimes scratching, humming a little, relaxed and completely at home. Delicately, he cups his head into his hand, and still upright, falls into a light, contented sleep. The launderwoman walks in with a bag of chips in her hand, sees him, shouts ‘filthy dog’, takes off her slipper and starts to beat him. He shouts at her, gesticulating wildly with his hands, the rings on his fingers glittering in the artificial light. She drags him to the door and throws his eighty-year-old body out into the street. She is the daughter of the cleaning lady who once dissolved all grafitti in the asylum.
The psychiatrist in the asylum the Turkish Tramp King is sent to, writes this report (a translator was present) of their first conversation: ‘2pm on a very cold Sunday afternoon I am tired so walk to the palace my oldest son build for me … for siesta. I delouse myself and find happiness in sleep. I am woken by a stranger shouting at me and beating me in the face with a shoe. She pushes me into the street and breaks my radio.’
The psychiatrist is the grandson of the doctor who strapped electrodes into the red head of the artist, and he in turn will strap electrodes onto the grey head of the Turkish Tramp King.
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ii.
Nato planes fly at regular intervals overhead. The sky as muddy as the peat soil below. Sparse scattered grass. Bleak flat fields. Filthy goats scavage for shrubs. A long dull view. In the distance Borstal boys build a sea wall that does not need to be built; they are not unaware of this fact. Each has an orange number tattooed on the back of his donkey jacket. Further on, where the land is ploughed, small frozen waves of soil. North sea winds. The planet stripped to its lowest common denominator. Sky and Earth.
‘Are you contracepted?’
‘Yes.’
The landscape a physical expression of all that is bleak and stripped inside. At this moment it is possible to imagine the ghosts of one hundred million of our species slaughtered in the last sixty years, rising from the dark earth in terrible accusing silence. It is also possible to imagine the same species employing the rhetoric of morality to justify their murder.
‘I suppose I should have asked you that before.’
‘Yes. I suppose you should have.’
He is the great-grandson of the artist who placed candles on the rim of his hat to achieve a light he felt to be true and she is the granddaughter of the writer who grafittied the asylum.
They are lying in an old rowing boat called ‘Noble Savage’ parked on a desolate beach. Sea gulls swoop and shriek above them, sometimes disappearing into the grey sea.
‘My great grandfather,’ he says, doing up his flies, ‘was a God intoxicated man … ein Gottbetrukener.’ He runs his fingers lightly down her arm … ‘He needed to do more of what we have just done.’ She lies there and wonders whether she loves or hates him. Her silence disturbs him, as does the lonely thrashing of the sea and the gulls searching for food in it. After a while he asks how the plot is developing in the play she is currently writing for a theatre in London.
‘I’m not interested in plot.’
‘How many characters will there be?’
‘I’m not interested in characters.’
He is not sure how serious she is. ‘Narrative?’
‘I’m not interested in narrative.’
He picks at a splinter in his finger … ‘Are you cross with me?’
She shuts her eyes.
He is toying with the idea she might be ideologically unsound.
Plato and Aristotle lie in a shady bower somewhere in Athens, buggering each other. Plato takes out a small jar of olive oil. Aristotle flinches. ‘I want you to fuck me not fry me.’ Plato frowns as he applies the oil. ‘I see I will have to sodomise your poetic inclinations Aristotle. Your emotions are disorganised and you only understand the world in an illusory way,’… he thrusts more brutally than usual. Aristotle is in considerable pain. ‘Plato … to deprive a man of his emotional equipment is to make him a useless ethical siphor … ZEUS! … what are you doing to me? … without even the potential for goodness.’ Plato is sweating and about to have an orgasm. ‘The emoti … emo … emotions aroused in po … poet … ry … is one of infection … and … can … can … only lead to eeeeeeeeeeeexcess!’ He stifles his cry and collapses, flushed and breathless. Aristotle who is neither flushed nor breathless, composes a little ditty:
Plato, You declare war
On emotion and unreason –
To see it any other way
You consider treason.
In this respect you are not
So different from Nato.
Aristotle resolves to devote his life to poetics and start up a school for young philosophic Greek men. They will learn plot construction, character, unity of action and narrative. To see it any other way will be considered treason.
She opens her eyes to discover the gulls have been replaced by a Nato plane hovering above their boat.
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He is sitting in the audience watching the first night of her play. For some reason he feels vulnerable and irritated; the intense atmosphere of the theatre, burning lights, rose water, talc, the pile of black roses heaped on the stage, the hypnotic beating of the drums, the ornate head-dresses of the drummers, which appear to be paper structures of the Chamber of Commerce, leave him fumbling for words, language to express what it is that irritates him. He is aware that some kind of magic is being worked on him and resents this; he is aware that the magic is ‘female’ in some way; he is thinking the stage should be purged of everything magical if it is to be of critical importance to the working class. He is toying with the idea she might be ideologically unsound. Something is on fire: the Chambers of Commerce, previously blessed by the priest are now being burnt. The drumming has stopped; his argument is formulated: impulse and imagination are corrupt luxuries of the bourgeoisie. One of the actors walks on with a life-sized puppet and starts to undress it … it becomes clear the actor is a gaoler … as the puppet is stripped naked … he is craning his head now … it can be seen that it has a nervous system drawn OUTSIDE its body … three more gaolers/actors enter … the first gaoler is now giving a lecture using the life-sized puppet to demonstrate the social system of the body. He leans back in his chair irritated again and notices the critic sitting in front of him, who has up to now been scribbling in a bored, ostentatious way, now very noisily stands up and makes his way out of the theatre. Their eyes meet fleetingly, they read each other, shake their heads, feel better. Social system of the body? He is currently writing a book on ‘The Social System’ and has formed a collective of specialists to research the subject. Something comes to mind … a dinner party to which he’d invited some of these researchers … they asked her about her work … she was grating carrots for the salad … and she said … it seemed at least as advanced or radical to attempt a more social art as not to … while she was talking she had by mistake grated her knuckles and the carrots were covered in blood. He had wondered at the time why attempting a more social art was even debatable.
What purpose does realism serve? … I asked.
An elderly actor in a timeless suit places his fingers arthritically on the yellowed keys of a BECHSTEIN piano and begins to play a distorted version of The Red Flag. This character has appeared before and is known as ‘The Heretic’. He begins to speak in a broken East European accent:
‘My friends in the party used to say to me … Jacob, you play the piano like you talk politics … you ramble in and out of sense … we don’t always understand your argument at the time … but afterwards … well … So they listened to me … in their own way. Come the Twentieth Congress and Stalin’s activities are out in the open … they said now is the time Jacob … to come to the aid of the party. You must make sense in the light of what has happened … the people’s spirit must be raised … their faith renewed … you can serve them. Give up this obscure nonsense you are composing … the people will not listen … it tells them nothing of their lives. And I replied … the people must then be taught to listen. I am myself a person.’ He takes a relative, pulpy, honey-coloured pear resting on the musty surface of the piano and throws it up to the ceiling. ‘Science after all, is only relative.’ The pear does not fall down again.
‘What purpose does realism serve? … I asked … Are images of starving children, beaten workers, brutal factory owners … realistic? Myself, I think they’re absurd. Music … like revolution … must be a celebration of all the senses … a celebration of what human beings are capable of making. So. What is to be done? First … we must locate the vision… the imagination that helps us to see these great things. If capitalism teaches us to see … we must then re-learn how to look. If capitalism teaches us how to hear … we must then re-learn how to listen. If you choose to censor me along with the capitalist … comrade that is your choice. I cannot pretend it makes me happy. In spite of myself, I need to be heard … dare I say … applauded. I would like a few comforts to make the rest of my days pass more easily … Comrade… what I am saying to you … is … I am hungry.’
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She is eating a large prawn and mayonnaise sandwich. Every now and again she sips a slim glass of chilled white wine. He is drinking beer and waiting for her to answer his question. The bar is filling up with people from the theatre; some wave and smile at her, others avoid catching her eye: an unspoken understanding allows her to eat and drink before she answers their questions. He is unaware of this. He is also unaware that her hands, which are green from dyeing costumes, are trembling slightly as she holds the sandwich she has bought to satisfy another kind of hunger.
A blonde woman with tresses of pre-raphaelite hair smiles at him. He smiles back and fiddles with the ivory cufflinks near his wrists; he is a handsome, red-haired, blue-eyed man and has an easy grace coupled with a kind of inner determination that women find attractive. These women, whom he calls his political allies, usually type out and collate his research and make the bed after they have slept the night together. The blonde walks to their table, a little shyly; he assumes a curious benign expression and sips his beer. She does not address her words to him:
‘Excuse me. Are you the playwright?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just wanted to know why you made the heretic a man?’ She pushes back her hair and waits for an answer.
‘Because all women are heretics.’
He shifts uneasily on his chair and exchanges a confused conspiratorial glance with the blonde inquisitor. The playwright continues, aware that the woman is not really interested in her reply: she feels trapped and her heart is beating faster than her thoughts: ‘If all men dominate this culture then all women who are excluded from making it, are heretics. Even women who comply with men.’ He pulls up a chair and invites the woman to join them; she pushes back her hair again, smiles, thanks them both. His eyes flirt with her long fingers and the cigarette poised between them. In a curiously gentle voice, he says: ‘This whole question of heresy is a fascinating one … We seem to have an inbuilt tolerance of different fundamental structures of experience. Take East and West for example!’ She nods her blonde head and they begin to chat, now and then avoiding each other’s eyes, at other times holding contact and saying something quite different. A lithe dark-haired woman has been watching this scene; she walks to the table and whispers into the playwright’s hair … ‘I will crack the putrid bones of polemic and hypocrisy between my teeth for your next production.’ She walks away as lightly and as speedily as she arrived.
‘Who was she?’
‘An Italian car worker.’ She turns to him. ‘Why do you think you can love a collective, when you don’t even know how to love an individual?’ She picks up her wine and takes it to the other side of the bar where a small group of people have been waiting patiently to show their love for her.
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A profusion of blossom litters the city for the entire Spring. Ice-cream vans do their rounds earlier than usual, buds sprout even in the most desolate of soil, city cats frolic in the early sunshine. Oxfam stops sending aid to the Third World and concentrates on the immense poverty sprawling over England like white film over a blind eye.
An expert on art appointed by the state to fund art that serves the state, decides to put an end to all arts subsidies – with the exception of ballet, opera, a state orchestra, a state theatre and one literary magazine that will continue to pretend England is an old cultured gentleman instead of a small businessman frightened of books and theatres and ideas.
The sun is blistering his red complexion. He puts his hand over his eyes and resolves to visit the barber in the afternoon. An elderly black woman shuffles out of the white washed house carrying a tray of iced lemonade and a hat. She clicks her tongue when she sees his burnt face and neck:
‘Tonton you must protect yourself from the heat. It is not good for a European to face the sun bare-headed.’ She pours out the lemonade and he puts the hat idly on his head.
‘Thank you Matine.’ He gulps down the iced drink gratefully and she pours him out some more, using her other hand to scatter flies.
‘No calls for me today?’
‘I have been shopping for your dinner all day Tonton … if I am busy as yesterday with your calls I will have faiblesse.’ She has learnt good English over the years as a servant to European visitors, but every now and again breaks into her native Creole. ‘You are very famous man.’ She laughs. ‘Elite.’ He is a famous man. His first book was an international success and on most university book lists, his second equally successful but more specialised, and now he has been commissioned to write a third entitled The Social Implications of Voodoo in Haiti. As universities have either closed down in England, or had their funding halved, this third book might not sell as well as the others. However the fact that he is the great-grandson of the famous artist has been instrumental in helping to sell the books; it is mentioned on every cover in every language and even been the subject of a slim paper-back comparing them.
What he has inherited is admirable self discipline, although he has this to excavate scientific and rational data for academic study, rather than form for emotional and social disorder as his great-grandfather did. He also has the added distinction of a lobeless ear which is said to have been removed in a fight he had many years ago with a lover in England. Apparently he had told her mayonnaise was ideologically unsound.
‘Tonton, will you eat rice tonight?’
‘Matine, I will eat what ever you cook for me.’ She shuffles back into the house to wash the rice.
He looks up at the cloudless sky and is dazzled by the light.
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After she came out of the asylum for mutilating her lover’s ear, a kind of novelty attached itself to her name – thus ensuring a large audience for anything she chose to do. She was silent, saw nobody and wrote nothing. Her supporters soon dwindled, taking refuge in a form of extreme esotericism appreciated by a handful of esoteric people. Most of them later on, took financial bribes and filled their large houses with priceless paintings and burglar alarms.
Two winters later, when the remaining trees in her neighbourhood were chopped down by the local council, she created a ‘happening’ in the Turkish Launderette. Local mothers, fathers, grandparents and children participated. The chef from ‘The Sultans Kitchen’ played the Turkish Tramp King, the Greek mama from the grocery store decided to stop hating the Turks for a day and played the Turkish Tramp Queen – they were married by children from the estate with much sprinkling of multi-coloured washing powder. The librarian composed the music with the doner kebab man – a stormy partnership due to grease on the score and a conflicting sense of rhythm, the Italian car worker cracked toy junta soldiers between her teeth, a woman just released from Holloway prison for breaching the peace grafittied a broken clothes wringer with: ‘THE ENGLISH FOR LONDON IS WASHINGTON’ and three Jamaican girls limbo-danced into the tumble driers. The woman from the chip shop played the launder-woman who beat the Turkish Tramp King with her shoe. He told her how he’d been stripped of his homeland and she told him how she’d been evicted with her young daughter by the bailiffs for not being able to pay the rent. Together they come to the decision that they share a mutual homelessness and have been exiled from wealth they helped to create in the first place. The launderwoman offers the newly weds a free wash in the machines to celebrate, and the Greek mama forgets she is playing the Turkish Tramp Queen for a minute to tell the launderwoman she always does her washing by hand because she doesn’t trust machines. The chorus sings its last song happily and badly and everyone gets ready for a procession down the road to the Sultan’s Kitchen. Here, a drunken, messy, abundant and glorious feast is being prepared by dispossessed people, for dispossessed people. They will toast each other and celebrate the magic that is theirs, saving their scraps for the boss-eyed cat whose stomach is swollen with kittens.
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Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed ‘living autobiography’ trilogy: Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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