The Museum of Modern Love (27 page)

BACK IN GEORGIA, JANE MILLER
watched the webcam that was her eye into the atrium. The camera was angled to capture the floor of the square. Jane could just see the far edge with feet, crossed legs, bags sprawled amid waiting people. She'd had an email from Matthew, the shabby-shoed lawyer. It had been sweet and funny. And then a text had come through from Brittika, the young Dutch girl doing her PhD.
Next in line. Nervous.

I'm part of a community, Jane thought. She couldn't see the queue, only the young woman currently sitting opposite Marina. She was crossing and then uncrossing her arms and legs. She sat forward and then she sat back. She scratched and then crossed her arms again, but still she sat, as if Marina was her opponent in a silent battle of wills. The girl put her hands in her pockets. She wiggled and crossed her legs again.

‘What are you trying to prove?' Jane asked aloud. ‘Why stay if you're so uncomfortable?'

But despite her restlessness, the young woman did stay, and she appeared to be returning Marina's gaze with a petulant stare. Marina in turn was a rock that loved her regardless of what happened. Jane peered more closely at the young woman. She looked familiar. She opened the monograph of the show she had
purchased in the MoMA store. Flicking through the pages she found a girl straddling a bicycle seat, high up on a wall, her arms outstretched, completely naked. She thought it looked decidedly like the girl sitting in the chair. Was the young woman one of Marina's re-performers? One of the cast of thirty or so who had been specially trained by Marina?

The media had all but dismissed the re-enactments, saying the young people lacked the charisma Marina and Ulay had brought to the original performances. Perhaps the young woman was naked and ready for work under her trench coat, Jane considered.

The young woman gave a final irritated wriggle and stood up. She was quickly replaced by Brittika, unmistakeable with her trademark pink bob.

The phone rang and Jane answered it. ‘Hi, Bob, I'm in the middle of something right now,' she said. ‘How about five? Great. See you then.'

Brittika settled in the chair opposite Marina. Marina lifted her head and Brittika took off the summer frock she was wearing to reveal her entirely naked body.

Jane's eyes opened wide and an ‘Oh' escaped her lips.

Within moments the guards were upon Brittika, heaving her from the chair, and Jane lost sight of them as they moved out of the scope of the webcam.

In another moment, an older man replaced Brittika at the table. Marina, who had dropped her head, lifted it again, locked eyes with the man, and the performance continued.

What had Brittika been thinking? Jane wondered. She was certain Brittika was off in some room where she could be charged with . . . what? Public nudity? Indecency? But there were people upstairs naked. Jane hoped they'd let her dress again, let her have that dignity. She wondered if people had clapped. She considered
calling Brittika, but to say what?
What were you thinking?
What on earth were you thinking?

At 5 pm she met with Bob, their farm manager, and they went through the last month's results. Since Karl's diagnosis she had thought a lot about the chemicals they used every day on the cotton. Known to cause cancers, tumours, mutations in fish, birds and humans. It had been one of the few things she and Karl had fought about over the years, but they'd stopped fighting once he got the tumour. She thought about their workers and wondered how much longer she could go on just because the world needed cotton. She'd talked organics to Bob, but she might as well have said she wanted him to become a Muslim.

Her eldest daughter had called and invited her to dinner, and Jane was pleased to go. It was so hot and muggy and there were only so many meals for one that she could get excited about.

Coming home later, in the cool of evening, there was a startlingly yellow full moon. The house was no noisier than it had been when she left. The rooms no fuller. The bed no untidier. She tossed two cushions off the couch onto the floor just to give the sense of something having happened. After her daughter's home, with her three little children banging about, the contrast was hard to bear. Jane never thought she'd miss the rattle and roar of a football game on the television. Or spreadsheets on the kitchen table with Karl calling her to come in here and look at these projections because he couldn't make it add up.

She sat again at the computer and went over the latest profit and loss, assessing the costs that had escalated and the subsidies from government that had boosted income. After a while she reopened the MoMA website and looked at the photographs of the latest people who had sat. The expressions were so curiously raw, she thought. Like that moon tonight. Entirely unguarded.
Evidence that life had been going on a long, long time and still no one was any the wiser about how to explain it. The mystery of individuality despite every indication that we were all pretty much the same. It was a fact of human beings, the variation of physical differences and the sameness of motivations.

She wondered if, after all, she was silly not to have sat. She did not think of herself as lacking courage. But she could count on one hand the things she could describe as truly brave acts. Childbirth three times over. And burying Karl. Literally watching him go into the ground. She thought she'd split in two just standing there.

She thought of how Marina and Ulay had walked all that way to say goodbye to one another. And the fact he had come back, on the very first day of
The Artist is Present
, to sit with her. That had touched her very much. Ulay's face in the photograph. The mischief in his eyes and the look of knowing old love.

She could have flown back to New York to see the last days of
The Artist is Present
. But it was too late to get it organised now. She had a shareholder meeting next week for a company in which she had invested quite a sum. Still, she felt more restless than she had ever felt in her life.

‘Maybe I need to walk like Marina. Maybe a walk would help. What do you think of going walking, Karl? But not towards each other. Let's both go in the same direction,' she said, regarding his face in the photograph on the desk.

‘How about that walk in Spain that is so popular? You remember—I told you about it last weekend when there was that program on the television. We could do that. I could be a little Catholic again after all these years. Maybe a walk would do us both good.'

Would it be crowded at this time of the year? And was she fit enough? Maybe she should wait until September, when the
weather cooled. She'd have to go halfway around the world. She'd need a travel agent and a passport. And was a walk in Spain what she really wanted to do? Yes, she decided. I think it is. It would be a year since Karl had died. A sort of anniversary then.

With such concerns occupying her mind, she wished Karl a good night and blew out the candle in its glass jar next to his photograph.

MARINA BEGAN AT SHANHAIGUAN, IN
the east, where the Chinese said the dragon's head rested in the Yellow Sea. It had been a marriage walk, but now, after thirteen years, it had come undone, this thing that had bound them so intensely.

It had been eight years in the planning. Letters and permits, visas and money, diplomacy, the Netherlands and China, international cultural exchange, itineraries, reissued itineraries, squabbles, bureaucrats, flights and trucks, government hotels and no camping.

They had wanted silence and solitude. Nights under the stars like they'd had in the desert in Australia, a minimal crew that would not interfere with their private, meditative walk. But there was so little time to be truly alone. Only when she walked, when the camera crew was ahead or behind, in the tracts of film they managed to capture when each day they finally arrived at the wall, driven in vans from some obscure location where it had been essential to stay. Then she had time to connect with herself, with this ancient place, with this land. And in those moments the sky and the path and the sense of scale humbled her and sometimes released her.

Ulay began at the tip of the dragon's tail, at Jiayuguan, in the barren Gobi desert. She had no way of knowing if he too was experiencing the chaos of Chinese bureaucracy that corroded the days. She had no contact with Ulay or his crew.

Once she had thought of Ulay as her perfect hermaphroditic union. Her creative and spiritual union. Walking towards each other, they had originally planned to be drawn closer by the magnetic power of each other. Now they walked against the current that had pushed them apart.

Still, they both felt that it was the fitting thing to do. To walk this route of mythology, of dragons and gods and wild men. The Chinese said the dragon connected earth and sky. And the wall was constructed in mirror image to the Milky Way. So they were walking the stars too.

Coming from the east, Marina had to walk the sections of the wall most popular with the tourists. They had little interest in her, being more concerned with snapping each other against the giant stone backdrop. She carved her way through clicking cameras. She climbed the winding wall, the relentless steps, the ancient escarpments. She passed through the towers with their brass bowls for purification. She walked the chakra points of the earthbound and celestial dragon, and the way of human life gone long into the past.

Every day the Chinese bureaucrats and officials who accompanied her, or who joined them in each new province, insisted that paperwork be signed off in triplicate, and that each day begin with meetings and end with meetings. This exhausted her and she retreated to whatever bare concrete cell she has been assigned in yet another bare communist hotel and allowed the discussions and arguments to go on without her.

By day she measured the landscape with her body. Feeling the scale, the beauty, the poverty beyond the wall work upon her,
soaking into her eyes. Step by step. Her legs each morning were stiff with yesterday's work. Marina started as early as possible, wanting to catch the sunrise, to have those moments of pure surrender, prayer and reflection, that she yearned for.

Soon the crowds diminished, the tourists evaporated, and she was a lone figure on the wall. She wore red. Ulay was in blue. Red dragon, blue dragon. They had dressed for the film, but also for their characters, for their own personal mythology, for the mythology of duality that they had played out all these years. As the days passed she felt like she lost track of who he was, what went wrong and even why they were walking. Some days she was more tired than she could remember ever being.

She wanted to see him walking towards her. She wanted him to hold her. She wanted duality but there was only singularity. Each step she took moved her closer to him, and to the end of together, the end of partnership, the end of connection, to the end of love.

She thought sometimes only step, step, step. Every step harder than the last. She tried to climb quickly but on the rough parts of the path, where the wall had crumbled, she groped for handholds, slid and slipped.

Marina and Ulay, red dragon, blue dragon, walked on. Now they were twelve hundred miles apart.

Marina was in the middle of nowhere familiar. She felt the fear of that, and the happiness. This was what she loved. To be in the unknown. To be on the other side of fear where everything became possible. She was emptying herself. The irritation of bureaucracy, the hours of boredom as she endured long car rides and nights on hard beds after bad food—it all released her. Her body went on without her feeling attached to it. She might have
been the wind or one of its riders, she did not know. Or perhaps the wind rode her.

Why had she loved Ulay? Why had there been such a force between them? How was it that they had the same birthday? That when they met they were both wearing chopsticks in their hair? That he felt half female while she felt half male. How was it that he felt like the person she had known through lifetimes? As if she had loved him and hurt him time after time, and that she could love him hard enough to destroy him. What was that? What was her rage and her pain, her grief and hollowness? Because for all they'd been, for all they'd travelled, were travelling these thousands of miles, she had no idea what she was going to do with her life beyond this.

Weeks passed. Months passed. One thousand miles. Five hundred miles. The ugliness of the bad hotels brought paradox and Tito, the excess and scarcity of communism. It brought back the controls and limits and corruption of a world she could not wait to be free of. But still she walked. And tried to shed the numbness every day with the sheer beauty of the landscape and the immensity of the human spirit that had built this wall and fought for centuries to protect an empire.

She might have been another sort of woman. She might have had a child, been a mother, a wife. But she couldn't feel that this time. She didn't want it. They'd chosen not to. She'd chosen not to. She wanted this life, this one life for herself. And if that was selfish, if that was the harder road, then so be it. She would do it alone. She would find the next step and the next step and the next step. She had no future she could see. She would carve it out for herself as they'd carved out the steps for this wall. On one side was the past, the other the future. One side heaven, the other hell, one side black, the other white, one side night, the
other day. Life was duality. She thought she'd found her other half, but it turned out that he was one of her many halves. She could see things in him that she didn't find kind or good. They irritated her. Stung her. She could see the greater person he might be, but he didn't want that. Only she wanted that.