The Museum of Modern Love (24 page)

When she had begun to learn cello, she thought it might be something they could do together, or maybe that had been Lydia's plan. But it wasn't until Alice got back from Paris and he heard her play in her band that he asked her to come play with him in Healayas's band. She realised before then he simply hadn't rated her as a musician.

Abramović's voice in the crackly headphones was saying: ‘
Failure is so important. You have to experiment. Failure is part of the process.
'

New York attracted extreme things, Alice thought. The French guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers when they were still standing. Abramović sitting for seventy-five days in silence. To fall, to fail, the possibility of disaster was so close.

Alice didn't like to fail. She had worked hard not to fail. She thought she may be failing her mother but she didn't know how to solve it. She rose and moved on through the retrospective. In the next room a girl about her own age was naked high on a wall. Alice observed a tiny seat between her legs, a little clear plastic bicycle seat almost invisible in the girl's pubic hair. Her arms were outstretched. People were standing at the back of the room watching. Alice walked forward and the young woman met her eyes. Alice did not look away. The girl's arms moved infinitesimally. Her feet were on tiny supports and as Alice watched she saw that the girl was moving incrementally to keep herself pinned to the wall. Alice worried for her so high up and exposed to the concrete floor, people staring at her nudity.

Alice visited her mother every weekend she could. It took three trains, but she read and studied, and it was a new pattern. To dress your mother was a strange thing. It had about it a sense of continuum. Her mother did not make eye contact. Her
expression was entirely passive, as if she was daydreaming. She didn't speak, although sometimes she sighed. Her mother was taken to shower in a wheelchair. The nurses spoke to her, the poem of the health worker recited to reassure the patient of the small and essential tasks of day and night
: there we go, sliding you into the chair, now lifting your feet, one, two, that's it, and now off we go into the bathroom, here we are, that's right, now off with your nightdress, and shower on, oh lovely, not too hot, not too hot, that's right, nice and warm, let's wash your hair, that's right, let's close your eyes . . .

They returned her mother to her in towels. Alice had dried the skin between her mother's toes. She clipped her mother's toenails and blow-dried her hair. Later, when her mother was again in her chair by the window, wearing a fresh kimono in patterned green silk over white cotton pyjamas, Alice took out nail polish and with careful strokes painted her mother's fingernails and toenails a sparkling turquoise blue.

She shifted and the artist on the wall gently released Alice from her gaze.

Alice walked into a larger room. It was a performance called
The Room with the Ocean View
. Her mother had an ocean view now. Her room took in the dunes and the sea and the sea took in Lydia. Lydia liked to sit by the window. She had made noises, appeared in microscopic ways to be agitated if she was moved elsewhere. If Alice sat on the floor and placed her mother's hand on her head, Lydia made tiny motions with her fingers as if she was attempting to stroke Alice's hair. This she could only do with her right hand. She could not grip a cup or hold a pencil.

‘Are you sure you wouldn't like to go home?' she had asked her mother, but there was no reply. The apartment on Columbus that had been their home for twenty years was gone. Alice had seen the new apartment only before her parents had purchased
it. She had not been there since her father had moved in. He had never invited her.

Her mother was the sort of person who was greeted by the greengrocer. Who remembered the names of everyone in their building, including most of the maids and nannies that came and went from various apartments. When they ate at Cafe con Leche, the staff gathered around them and made a fuss, knowing Lydia would order the black bean soup, Levin the roast pork and she, Alice, would order the
chicharrón de pollo
, which as a child she had loved to say almost as much as to eat.

Home was a different notion now. Home was her clothes and books, the little window by her desk looking down onto a rooftop garden where no one ever sat. There were rituals of Cointreau late on Saturday nights after their weekly gig and huevos rancheros on Sundays. Home was her cello and her bass guitar. Home was being able to rehearse with her fellow band members in the tiny studio below street level on Seventh. Home was the squealing plumbing when the shower ran, and the creak in the floorboards by the fridge.

In
The House with the Ocean View
, Marina Abramović had created a home comprising three white rooms attached to the walls of the gallery, accessible only by three ladders with knives for steps. From the speakers Abramović's voice narrated every step and action she had taken over the twelve days she lived up there. ‘
I take a deep breath and my chest rises. Then it falls. I remain sitting still. My feet are flat on the floor and spaced hip-width apart. My back is straight against the chair. My head does not move. Only my eyes blink. The rest of my body is motionless
.'

Alice could have made a similar account of her mother's days. She suspected her mother was on a long journey away from the grace of ordinary. She might suffer another stroke. She might
die somewhere while her mind was far away. Alice did not know how she would live without her.

Lydia was on the dialysis machine each week. They had completed another round of plasma exchange. To look at her, she appeared as fragile as mist. There was a calm about her that may have been life leaving, or life returning, Alice could not tell.

Yesterday, Alice had laid a brand new Moleskine notebook beside her mother's chair and a 4B pencil that she knew her mother favoured. Her mother had shown no sign of recognition or acknowledgement when Alice arrived. Only her hand on the top of Alice's head moving ever so gently seemed to indicate that, somewhere inside, she remembered.

When she was a child, Alice's scrapbooks had been full of clippings from brochures of taps and door handles, wall and floor claddings, architectural magazines, houses lit for the evening, foodless kitchens, bathrooms without toys, beds without evidence of sleep. Every birthday her mother constructed from cardboard and foam core a new doll's house according to Alice's latest ideas—a tree house, a stable, a house five storeys tall, a lighthouse. She had spent a great deal of time watching her mother go from one hundred miles an hour to a complete stop. There was fast Lydia and slow Lydia. Slow Lydia slept a great deal of the time. Slow Lydia lay in bed and watched movies and played cards with Alice. Slow Lydia spent days in hospital. Slow Lydia was there in bed when Alice arrived home from school. When Alice had realised it was only medical knowledge that could save her mother, she had set her sights on becoming a doctor of haematology.

In the quiet room behind the dunes of Long Island, Alice had unlocked the clips on her cello case. She moved through the Suites for Solo Cello 1−6 and her mother remained entirely silent, fixed by the sea.

DANICA A BRAMOVIĆ WANDERED THROUGH THE
retrospective, seeing photos of her daughter's life that she knew nothing of. Marina had made her life everywhere but Yugoslavia. Even during Milosevic, she never came home. She let herself be slapped by that German, let herself be naked with him, traipsed after him across Europe showing her naked body to the whole world. But it hadn't brought her happiness. Love was a wasteland. That's the way it went, Danica knew. ‘You want to be a strong woman?' she asked the visitors who wandered by, oblivious to her. ‘Then you will never find a man who treats you as an equal. You have to play the little games. Oh, giggling, cooking, making them think they have such a huge cock every time they put it near you. The truth is that men are the empty ones. And women are meant to fill them up. I could count on a few fingers the men I ever truly admired. Give them long enough and men are always disappointing.'

Danica leaned towards a photograph of her daughter carrying an armful of firewood. ‘I shake my fist at that film you made of Serbia, bringing this on our good name. The humping men and naked women showing their
pi'cka
. Your mockery of our songs. I denounce you, too, for slicing our beloved communist star into
your stomach. And that thing in Venice at the Biennale, scrubbing the bones of cows. They gave
you
the Golden Lion! Has the world gone mad?'

Danica remembered the room in the apartment she had given Marina for her studio and how Marina had smeared shoe polish all over it. But I made her live with it, Danica thought, that ugly smell—but not as ugly as that great pile of rotting cow bones, there in Venice.

People had said to her, ‘Ah, your daughter is so famous. You must be very proud.'

‘I am proud,' Danica would reply. But she did not say of what she was proud and it wasn't Marina. What mother could be proud of that? Showing her breasts, burning the communist star. Whipping herself naked. And that time in Milan with the gun and the bullet and all those other things they could have hurt her with. It's a wonder she wasn't raped.

She had read Marina's interviews. ‘My mother bought me only flannel pyjamas three sizes too big each birthday. My mother punished me. My mother hit me. My mother tried to kill me. My mother never kissed me. My mother hid my real birth date from me. My mother this, my mother that.'

Danica, in her new lightweight form, had been there when Marina had gone to clear out her apartment the day after the funeral.

Marina had found the trunk with the scrapbooks.

‘Don't open them. None of that is for you. It's not for anyone,' she tried to tell Marina. But death was impotence.

Inside were the newspaper clippings, the magazine articles, everything dated, catalogued and recorded. Right back to 1967. Every mention of the artist Marina Abramović. Even some little leather clouds, yellowed and curled, stuck into the pages. The
first art Marina had made. Danica hadn't meant to leave the box for anyone to find. She had been too sick to remember it.

Marina had taken every little thing from the trunk. Turned over the war medals. Read the citations from President Tito. Read the letters from the survivors. And there she was, a grown woman, nearly sixty, weeping on Danica's bed.

‘You see, Marina,' Danica had said, too late for Marina to hear her words. ‘A mother is just a heart. You pain me, every day of my life, with those dark eyes. You reproach me. But discipline is the only thing that protects you when the world goes mad. I thought it would make you safe.'

From the sixth floor Danica looks down into the atrium at her daughter far below, alone in the middle of the world.

‘You know I would rescue you from a burning truck. I would carry you to safety. Any moment you need it, I would do that for you.'

Love was a wasteland. Danica could no more fly down and scoop Marina up than swim the length of the Danube.

FRANCESCA LANG COULD HEAR HER
husband, Dieter, talking in French on the phone. It was another interview with one of the European media outlets. She peeled apples as the one-sided conversation washed through the open door. Marina wasn't talking to the media for three months, so Dieter must talk for her.

‘After the Biennale? Well, she hardly ever eats meat . . .'

‘Pre Ulay I think she was working out how to be an artist. Then twelve years with Ulay. Post Ulay there was uncertainty of course. And then extraordinary growth.'

‘She calls herself the grandmother of performance art. And this show, it will immortalise her.'

‘The thing that may surprise people is that she's a very gentle person. Very funny. Incredibly warm. Superstitious. She's very generous.'

‘She believes in seven-year cycles. So if something goes wrong . . . seven years.'