They Do the Same Things Different There (25 page)

She’d come to his room one night. Stood at the doorway, silhouetted against the landing light. “What is it?” he’d said. “Are you ill?” Which was, even looking back, a pretty stupid thing to say.

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital tomorrow,” she’d told him. “I’m sick of it. If I go in,” she’d said, “I’ll never come out again. This isn’t how I want to go.”

“No, Lizzie,” Ernest had said, and then cried. “I can’t do it. I can’t do to you . . . what we did to Blackie. I can’t.”

She’d climbed into bed next to him. “No,” she’d said. “We could just go, though, couldn’t we? Just get in the car, and go.”

“Go where?” he’d asked, sniffing away his tears.

“Somewhere else. Anywhere else. And never come back. No more hospitals. We’ve got lots of money saved, we could have a splurge, couldn’t we? We could splurge it all out.”

“It’d kill you,” he’d said.

“Yes,” she’d said. And she’d said no more, but spent that night with him after all. And the next morning he’d taken her to the hospital, just as they’d always planned. And Lizzie had been right—she had never come out again. He wasn’t there when she’d died a few days later. He’d wanted to say goodbye, be beside her bed when it happened. But you can’t be there all the time, can you?

Ernest woke up, found he’d been dozing again. His television was on, but the static behind the split glass looked reassuringly grey and normal. His stomach growled. “I’m going to get some lunch,” he told the television. “But I shan’t be long. I promise.”

In the kitchen he found some bread and some butter. Ideal for a sandwich. He also found the new television set. He’d forgotten it was there. “Ugly little thing,” he told it.

He picked up the remote control, turned it over in his hand. And then—and he didn’t think he’d pressed any of the buttons, but he supposed he must have—the television sprang to life. It was clear and it was sharp and it was
colourful
, my God, there was more colour on that screen than you got in real life, but principally it was
loud.
“Shut up,” he told it in alarm. He stabbed at all the buttons he could find. He didn’t hit the one to turn it off, but he did succeed in turning down the volume. “Keep quiet,” he hissed at it angrily. “There’s a sick television up there, and it’s better than you. And I don’t want it getting any funny ideas that you’re its replacement. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?”

And then he fell silent. Stared at the screen, his sandwich forgotten.

It was BBC2, and it was the snooker. The table was green—oh, it was such a green, you could imagine this was a snooker table only played upon by angels! Someone was lining up a shot, and with the perfect clarity of the image Ernest could see it wasn’t Ray Reardon, this man was young and short and scruffy even in his dinner jacket.

But it was the
balls.
The white and the black and the pink and the . . . so many reds, so many, all like the apple the Wicked Queen gave Snow White in that film, but nine of them, so plump and shiny and red you could
bite
them. He looked at the red on his arms and clothes, the blood from upstairs, and it wasn’t nearly so impressive.

The snooker player sank a red. And then a brown. Everyone applauded. Ernest had to sit down.

All these years, with his black and white television, he’d never been able to tell the red and the brown apart. It had caused some confusion. But Ernest knew that you could work out which was which, so long as you were patient, so long as you used your brain. The brown was put back up on the table, but the red, once potted, stayed down. Not knowing whether the player had miscued as he cannoned into the ball in question lent an extra soupcon of suspense to the game that Ernest knew he wouldn’t have experienced seeing the game live—his snooker, in all its monochrome ambiguity, was
better.
And here was this new television. This colour television. Making it all so
easy.
Explaining everything. As if its viewers were children. Idiots. To be patronized. Ernest looked around the kitchen, considered the rows of Tupperware bowls he’d been using. No, he’d need something heavier. The saucepan, that would do. He drove it hard into the television screen. Into all its colour and clarity and condescension. It fizzed and popped and banged.

When he went back upstairs, he saw that the snooker was playing on his black and white set as well. Though he hadn’t changed channels, as far as he could remember. But it was a different game—look, this time it was Ray Reardon. That was good. Ernest preferred Ray Reardon.

“Hello, Ernie,” said Ray Reardon.

“Hello, Ray,” Ernest replied.

“I’m in such pain, Ernie,” said Ray. “So why don’t you take that saucepan of yours, and smash my snooker-playing face in? Put me out of my misery.”

“All right,” said Ernest. And he lined up the saucepan, as if swinging a golf club. Come on, Ray gestured, come on, it’ll be all right. And then frowned as Ernest lowered his arms.

“I can’t,” said Ernest.

“Why not? You murdered that
TV
downstairs.”

“I know,” said Ernest. “But I can’t. I can’t let you down the way I did Blackie. Or the way I did Lizzie, either. I suppose,” he added, a little embarrassed, “I love you, Ray. I suppose that’s what it is.”

Ray stuck out his bottom lip, then rubbed his eyes, making boo-hoo gestures. Then he winked to show he was only kidding. And his face faded back into the snowstorm.

“Bye, Ray,” said Ernest.

He dropped the saucepan. He knew he wouldn’t be needing it. And he went close to the television, knelt before it. He put his arms around it the best he could, gave a squeeze to its unyielding bulk. “I love you,” he said once more. And he slept happily, a man who feared he’d never love again.

He was woken once more by the sound of the telephone. He stretched his arms painfully, surprised he’d slept in so uncomfortable a position that soundly. He decided to ignore the ringing, cuddle back next to the television, and snuggle. But the answering machine kicked in.

“Hello, Dad? It’s me. Look, I . . . I’m sorry about yesterday. I wasn’t in the best of moods, I think, the kids were driving me mad, and I . . . I’m sorry I snapped at you. It was silly. Look, I don’t know but . . . I thought I’d come over again. Just me this time. Would that be okay? Just the two of us. We haven’t talked, not really, I thought we could talk. About Mum, I miss her, you know, I know you do too . . . well, obviously. And I can show you how your new
TV
works. Hope it’s okay, it’s not new or anything, just an old cast-off, didn’t want to sling it out. And I’ll take away that old one for you . . . I love you, Dad. Don’t say that enough. Must say it more, I think. Love you.”

And the voice clicked off.

“Shit,” said Ernest. He looked at the room, all the blood, all the mess. “Shit,” he said again. And then, “Come on, we haven’t much time.”

The television set wasn’t as heavy as he’d expected. But as for all the leads and plugs—it was like spaghetti back there! Ernest didn’t have time to work out which wire connected to what, just pulled out as many as would set the television free, and hoped for the best. With a grunt, both arms stretched as far around the box as they could go, he took it from the table on which it had sat so many years. And puffing, ignoring the pain in his hands, in his back, the
screaming
pain in his hip, he edged toward the stairs. One foot shuffled forward, then the other. It looked as if he were dancing.

When he reached the top of the steps he was able to balance the television on the banister rail, catch his breath. It reminded him of having to carry Blackie to the kitchen all those years ago. “But I’m not taking you to the vet’s,” he promised the set. “You’ll see.”

Halfway down, the doorbell rang. Ernest froze. Peering through the banisters he saw the face of his son fractured and misshapen through the frosted glass.

“I’m not letting them take you now,” whispered Ernest.

Billy had parked out front. But it was all right. It was fine. Because Ernest’s car was in the garage. And he could get into the garage by the side door, and if he were quick, Billy would never notice. His muscles protested—they couldn’t
go
any quicker. But Ernest insisted. No one else was going to be slung out. There was going to be an end to all slinging.

“Dad?” he heard, as Billy knocked against the door. “Dad, are you in there?”

But Ernest had reached the car. He had to set the television down for a moment as he fumbled for his keys—he marvelled at his thin fingers, how bruised and squashed they now looked. But he didn’t feel anything, not a thing. With a final heave, he lifted the television into the passenger seat. Smiled at it. And then, with a sudden wave of concern, he pulled the seatbelt across it. “Got to keep you safe,” he said, as he climbed in next to it.

“Where are we going?” the television didn’t ask.

“Somewhere else,” said Ernest. “Anywhere else.” He turned the ignition, the car pulled out of the garage. He thought he caught sight of Billy’s surprised face at the front door, but he couldn’t be sure—he was travelling
so
fast, after all, so very fast, never faster. “And we’ll never come back,” he said, as he put his foot flat on the accelerator, and sped away onward to freedom.

We can speculate, and we can speculate, but the probability is that few of the silent movies made during the siege of Constantinople in 1453 were very much good. And there are clear reasons for this, both political and cultural.

On the one hand, we have to bear in mind the extremely trying circumstances under which the movies were being filmed. In attacking Constantinople, the Ottoman Turks were also attacking the last bastion of the Roman Empire (if only in symbolic form), a direct line of power that stretched back some two thousand years. It was also the seat of the Orthodox Christian Church, a force equal and opposite to the Catholic Church in Rome. Expansionist wars were two a penny in the fifteenth century, but this was no run of the mill example, it was already rife with meaning, and no doubt the Byzantines under threat would have been only too aware of that. Besides which, on a purely practical level, the constant cannoning of the city walls must surely have been a distraction. Even making silent movies, surely, some peace and quiet is required for concentration’s sake.

On the other hand, and perhaps more pertinently, Byzantine art had always defined itself by a certain flat austerity. Their mosaics and paintings that we can study today are colourful, but there’s a grim functionality to all that colour: the lines are severely drawn and make the characters depicted seem two-dimensional and un-dramatic. It would be foolish to expect that in the creation of an entire new art form several centuries of engrained Byzantine culture would be abandoned overnight. It is unfair to imagine that the clowns who pratfalled and danced and poked each other in the eyes in Constantinople cinema were other Chaplins, or Keatons, even other Fatty Arbuckles. The conditions were wrong. Their genius could not have flowered.

And yet, of course, we remain fascinated by those movies from the Byzantine age. And again, partly this will be because they were the pioneers, the history of cinema begins here with these shadowy figures by the Bosphorus doomed to be killed or enslaved by the Muslim potentate. But I hope our fascination is not purely academic. That we honour not merely the historical significance of what was invented, but that, with care and study, and an open mind, we try to appreciate the art on its own terms.

No entire print of a Byzantine movie survives, and that is to be expected. When the sultan Mahomet II appealed to the Byzantines to surrender, with the promise that their lives would be spared, his terms were rejected. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, said that the city could not be yielded, for it was no single man’s possession to yield. And with these brave words he sealed the fate of the fifty thousand inhabitants of Constantinople, and, more importantly, the fate of those few precious cans of film kept within. The Turks had besieged Constantinople for fifty-five days. They were tired and angry. When they broke the defences, as was the custom, the soldiers had permission to ransack and pillage the city for three whole days, taking plunder, razing buildings to the ground, and raping and slaughtering the populace. These were not conditions in which a fledgling film industry was ever likely to prosper.

And yet, we are lucky. In spite of all, some sequences of film are extant. They are fragments only, most no more than a few seconds long, but they still afford us a tantalizing impression of early cinematography, and what those Byzantine audiences must have enjoyed. One man tries to sit down upon a stool, and a second pulls it away, so he falls to the ground with his legs splayed in the air. A farmer waters his crops with a bucket of water, but a prankster holds it upright; when the farmer pours the bucket over his head to see what’s wrong, he gets soaked. It is not sophisticated comedy, granted, but there is a spirit of mocking fun to it; yes, it plays upon the weak and the vulnerable, but no one gets hurt, no one gets savaged, and certainly no one experiences the sort of carnage that is awaiting them at the end of the siege. Some historians have tried to read a political subtext into the extracts, but I think that can be exaggerated. One of the more (justly) admired sequences is of a beggar, or tramp, who at dinner sticks a knife into two vegetables and proceeds to do a puppet dance with them. In siege times food was scarce, and this flagrant disregard for its value can be seen as something deliberately provocative, a renunciation of the very crisis that would have caused the food shortage in the first place, and thus a renunciation of war. But what attracts us to the film is not its message, but its simple beauty: there is such elegance to the dance, and to the comic conceit of it, and for the duration the tramp smiles out at the viewer in childlike innocence.

One might have expected that there would have been a pronounced propagandist element to the films. But the Ottoman Turks are never referenced, and instead what is offered to us is cheap comedy and heightened melodrama. The longest extant extract—and, sadly, one of the most tedious—is a case in point. A moustachioed villain, sniggering silently to camera, ties a damsel in distress to a set of railway tracks. The damsel is left there for no fewer than six minutes of static inaction, as we wait for a train to come and flatten her; however, since we are many centuries shy of the invention of a locomotive engine, it is unclear how much jeopardy the girl can really be in. The tracks are not the important part; it is the villain. Wearing a gabardine common in fashion at the time, he looks like an everyday Byzantine. He’s not given a turban, or a Muslim beard, or shifty Oriental eyes. It’s the ideal opportunity for the filmmaker to identify and feed off a common threat to the audience, but it refuses to do so; even in its monsters, Byzantine cinema remains stubbornly domestic.

Many eyewitnesses recorded the siege of Constantinople for posterity, and the most celebrated is George Sphrantzes. Sphrantzes recounts the conflict from a mostly militaristic perspective, and pays depressingly little heed to the day-to-day to and fro of the thriving visual arts scene. Nevertheless, he does record in his diary how, one evening, shortly after the siege had been raised, he was ushered into a big hall alongside some other hundreds of citizens. There he took a seat, and the windows were covered with sacks, and the room was cast into darkness. He describes an expectation in the audience, something apprehensive, like fear, but more pleasurable than fear. And then, at the end of the room, facing them all, a large piece of white cloth was illuminated. He writes: “At first I thought there was a stain upon it, and then the stain enlarged, as if by magick.” It was no stain; it was the image of a horse and cart, and its approach toward the camera. George Sphrantzes describes the awe and wonder as the “moving painting” flickered upon the makeshift screen—and then the rising panic as it became clear that the horse and cart were coming directly at them. People rose from their seats; they stumbled toward the exit; they fell over in the darkness—if they didn’t escape, within
minutes
the cart would reach them and there might be an irritating bump. Sphrantzes records how the authorities arrested the man in charge of the exhibition for disturbing the peace.

No name of any actor has survived the fall of Constantinople. But the name of that man
has
survived, and he must be regarded as the first maverick genius of cinema. His name was Matthew Tozer.

It is all too easy to be seduced by images of the Byzantine Empire as a thing of great glory. That was true at its zenith, but its zenith was centuries past. By the time the Ottoman Turks lay siege to Constantinople, the empire had shrunk to little more than a city state, and the population within were a random ragtag of different nationalities from different backgrounds. Matthew Tozer (or Toza, or Tusa) was probably a Greek Cypriot, but his name is peculiar and no one can say for sure. There is no physical description of the man. There is no record of his beliefs, or anything he stood for—save his obvious love for the cinematic medium.

It is not even clear what Tozer’s part in the craze was, merely that he was at the very centre of it. Had he invented the principle of moving photography himself? Was he instead the director of the films, exploiting someone else’s discoveries? It is possible that he merely ran the cinema in which the movies were shown. Scientist, artist, entrepreneur—scholars argue which of them he may have been. Maybe there is no single Matthew Tozer. This essay does not purport to take any great interest in specious biography. For simplicity’s sake we shall assume Tozer is all three rolled into one: not so much a man, but a personification of a new art form. We can never know Tozer the individual; let us instead study Tozer the wave of revolution.

The earliest account we have of Tozer is what we now refer to as the “Horse and Cart Debacle.” Punishment in the middle ages was typically severe, especially in times of military crisis. But within days Tozer has been freed, and moreover, is showing new films, we can only suppose with the blessing of the authorities. Sphrantzes writes again, after a turgid account of a day setting up the city’s defences, and his concerns of a maritime engagement with the Turkish fleet: “And, in the evening, to the picture house, there to see a comedic play about three men and a mule. Silly stuff. Amiable.”

Sphrantzes might dismiss it as silly stuff, but it is clear that Tozer was doing something right. He set up a cinema just a stone’s throw from the Hagia Sofia, and there he’d show the latest movie releases—and the people of Constantinople began to flock to them in droves. It is important to remember what siege conditions were like in the fifteenth century. They were frightening, yes, and they were desperate, and they were hungry, but mostly they were very
boring
. With the Ottoman Turks on one side, and a naval blockade upon the other, there was really very little for the Byzantine folk to go and do in the evenings. However silly the movies on offer may have been, the distractions they provided were hugely popular, and tickets became highly prized; one anonymous commentator writes that to get in to see one particular blockbuster, a family bartered a week’s supply of precious bread. Tozer was forced to put on more and more screenings, sometimes letting his cinema run all night until dawn. He employed janissary bands to accompany the films with the music of harp, lyre, and zither; he employed young girls to serve sweet snacks in the intervals.

And what Tozer was accomplishing was not merely artistic, but also sociological. Because if these citizens of a dying empire were merely desperate stragglers with no real identity, here, at least, they could find something that unified them. They could sit in the dark together and laugh and cry as one collective. Is it too much to hope that at last they discovered that they had more in common with their fellow man than they had realized—that the same stunts thrilled them, the same custard pie fights kept them amused? Is this the irony of the end of the Byzantines, that only in their final days they became a proper people?

As for Tozer, he appears to have worked tirelessly. With almost superhuman energy he released several new movies a week, filming them during the day and presenting the results on screen once the sun went down. To satisfy the appetite of a citizenry starved of entertainment, he produced an oeuvre that makes Steven Spielberg look like some dilettante hobbyist. And with the introduction of a new art form, inevitably the people are inspired; they are no longer content to be mere spectators, they want to take part in the art form too. Sphrantzes complains, but when does Sphrantzes not complain? He writes that the most pressing concern the Byzantine population faced was the Muslim hordes outside the gates, and that work should be done repairing those gates, building new walls, training all able bodied men to fight. Instead everybody wanted to be an actor, to star in the movies, to see themselves flicker on the white cloth screens, to be famous, to be adored.

The greatest tragedy of the fall of Constantinople is that not one frame of Matthew Tozer’s masterpiece,
The Ten Commandments
, survives. A true epic, it ran for nearly six hours, and used over a thousand extras. It was a gamble on Tozer’s part; to find time to make it he had to close the cinema for three full days, and there was civil unrest and small-scale rioting whilst the people were left starved of their fix. But the gamble paid off. It is a testament not only to Tozer’s vaulting ambition but to his commercial canniness—even if you weren’t in the movie yourself you knew someone who was, and if you saw only one movie that season it had to be
The Ten Commandments
! The sets, by all reports, were sumptuous. The cast were on peak form. And the special effects were remarkable: to achieve the parting of the Red Sea, Tozer had used up a half of the besieged city’s water supply.

It was Tozer’s greatest achievement. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos took time off being the champion of the Orthodox Church to attend the premiere, and had even taken a cameo role as a burning bush. Could Tozer have suspected that it was all downhill from here? And that all that ambition would prove his undoing?

On 29th May 1453, the Ottoman Turks broke through the walls of Constantinople. Their troops numbered some one hundred thousand to the Byzantines’ seven thousand. The Turkish flag was flown from the battlements, and many of the Christian defenders lost heart. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos himself declared, “The city is fallen and I am still alive,” and he tore off his purple cloak of majesty, and entered the fray as a common soldier. His body was never found. The Byzantine people fought bravely, but with a certain dispassion perhaps, a certain defeatism.

The talkie movies had not been a success.

Matthew Tozer had been experimenting with sound for a little while now. He would have the orchestra time their drum beats to the exact moment an explosion appeared on screen, to give the impression that the bang had come from the movie itself. It was witty, but it was a gimmick, and the audience enjoyed it as a gimmick. When at the end of May Tozer announced the premiere of the first proper talking picture, with full dialogue and a pre-recorded score, the people were incredulous, then doubtful, then baffled.