One section of the kitchen wall is a slightly denser shade of white than the rest. I am the only person aware of this. In fact, after twenty-five years, it is probably something discernible to the mind's eye rather than actually visible.
Much of what has happened in those twenty-five years has slipped away forever, beyond recall, and I even imagined, for the best part of a decade, that I had left this house never to return - escaped, in a sense, although it was not so much the house that I needed to flee. And yet, now that I'm back and the house has reasserted its claims on me - its claim to me? - I remember what interrupted the repainting of the kitchen wall more clearly than some of the dramas and upheavals of the intervening years.
Strange as it may seem, what interrupted the repainting of the wall so memorably was a Hungarian film. A film directed by Marta Meszaros, although I do not recall its title, any more than I can account for why it left such a lasting impression on me, so that I can still project certain images - as fresh and clear-cut, and as frozen in time as illustrations I have seen of ice-crystals - onto the rather grubby white wall.
Why I should wish to do so today is another mystery, or perhaps simply another kind of escape. But it seems that the moment has come to revisit that archive.
Hungary, in particular Budapest, held a special fascination and significance for me, and that is no doubt why I was so ready to down my large paintbrush and rush off to catch a film at (probably, because this I don't clearly recall) an obscure, dingy suburban cinema which showed foreign-language films.
The film was about passionate obsession, and love - a marriage between an older woman and a younger man, a military officer, in Budapest before the second world war. They appear to be deliriously in love, but her feeling is stronger - voluptuous, voracious, all-consuming. Her desire for him is insatiable. One of the scenes that has remained crystallised in my memory is of a larder in a country retreat - a cottage or a hunting lodge belonging to her family - a room where apples are being stored against the coming winter. In this scene, you can feel the chill of autumn in the air, you can smell the apples, you can taste the sharp sap of the juice as you bite into one, and they glow in the cold grey light, their skins shading through gold to shiraz as if burnished.
The woman is arranging apples on a table when her husband finds her there, and soon, in the mutual intoxication they induce in each other, the apples are sent rolling across the floor along with the lovers, the autumnal woman and the man still in the glow of high summer. Such scenes have since become cinematic cliché - the apples as symbols of abundance, or temptation, or whatever significance the context calls for or confers. But in the Hungarian film the scene was vivid, piquant, bittersweet, and as if without precedent, conjuring up Indian summer, the woman's mellow sweetness on the verge of being withered by the frost of imminent winter.
So totally absorbed in each other are the lovers that it seems their circle of joy is complete, but the woman (let's call her Marta) wants more. She wants the impossible - to give him a child, and in her desperate determination she conceives a plan. Another woman will bear Marta's husband's child, but it will then become Marta's. Although it cannot be Marta's biological child, the natural mother will relinquish it at birth by prior agreement.
Marta's family is wealthy. She is able find a young woman of refinement (a music student? A cellist? I don't recall…) who is poor enough and needy enough to agree to her plan. The young woman is tastefully outfitted by the older one in a wardrobe of gowns in shades of copper, antique gold, rose, cinnamon, cerise, shiraz - and given her instructions.
The husband is embarrassed, reluctant to proceed with such a scheme. He tries to reassure Marta that they do not need a child to make their happiness complete, that it is enough that they have each other, but Marta is by this time obsessed with her plan, and will not be deterred.
Several social occasions ensue, in which the young woman, wearing her unaccustomed, exquisite, richly-coloured gowns (rather like Cinderella) spends time with Marta and her husband as a prelude to what Marta intends.
The private encounter between Marta's husband and the apprehensive, vulnerable young woman takes place at the hunting-lodge. She has never been with a man before, and the officer is touched by her purity, her modesty and her beauty. The image of her tugs at his consciousness and begins to displace that of Marta. The officer and the mother of his unborn child continue to meet in secret, and she comes to exert a different kind of sway over him from that of his wealthy, older and more dominating wife. The young woman's power over him is no less intense. It is the hegemony of love that can offer only itself, without trappings. He feels a profound tenderness for her that he has never felt for his wife.
Marta, possessive, jealous and vigilant, cannot fail to become aware of these developments, but she clings to the belief that if she can contain herself until the birth of the child, the young woman can then be banished forever.
The next scene I recall is of Marta, writhing on a bed as if giving birth, as the sounds of childbirth are heard from beyond the wall, where her husband, beside himself with concern and solicitude, is hovering as near as the midwife will permit to the young woman in labour.
Marta is waiting to pounce on the child, but her joy is stillborn. Her husband is repelled by the way she has manipulated events, and his only care is for the wellbeing of the baby's natural mother.
Several years pass, and Hitler's armies invade Budapest. Consumed with venom as she once was with passion, Marta hatches another plan.
The last scene I can still recollect is of the young woman in a queue of deportees, all wearing yellow armbands with the Star of David, shuffling through bleak winter streets under guard, to be shipped off to death camps. And the officer, still nominally Marta's husband, although he now leads a double life with the mother of his child, finding out too late to prevent this…
This is what I see when I look at the dingy white wall, where the paint is slightly denser, and which, for some reason, after seeing Meszaros's film, I did not finish painting. If I had not interrupted my painting to see it, would I remember the film with such clarity? If I were to finish repainting the wall now, which would mean starting again and redoing it, would I lose those images I have just described? Would they fail to appear when I looked at the wall if I painted over that section?
I have sometimes wondered what would happen if I were to see that film again. How much of what I recall is my own invention, my own film? But the opportunity for comparison has not so far arisen.
And why that film? Why then? Why now? "Why then" at least has a credible answer. My son, born the same year that I saw the film, was conceived in Budapest, under circumstances that now seem as remote and mysterious and unaccountable as the impression left by the film. The events of that time in Hungary may never be fully explained. It is similar to what happens when you try to recount the plot of a film. What is truly memorable, and why, mostly gets lost in translation.
And why do I now bother to write all this down? Is it because my own "menage a trois" is about to come to an end ? - although it was not a triangle in any conventional sense. There was an older woman and a younger man, it is true, but she never aspired to have a child with him, nor he with her. And theirs was a brief love affair which devolved, or better still, evolved into a passionate friendship, not without its perils, but chaste. It's quite another story really, one that doesn't fit the film's paradigm at all.
Perhaps it's just the consciousness of mutability, and what this does to people's lives, that brought the film to mind. And the fact that I am now alone within these walls, and likely to remain so. And because, although it's summer now, the day is more like autumn, overcast, its muted luminosity imbued with the sense of something golden drawing to a close, the glow of Indian summer fading into long, dark winter nights…
It could be, too, that the filmic images wordlessly affirm for me an essential truth that seems to underlie what is happening now - that love cannot be reconciled with or to or by walls. It can neither be confined nor kept at bay by them, neither locked out nor locked in. And so devotion between friends somehow surmounts obstacles, and lovers find that walls dissolve between them, fluid as images on film, captured in flight and stored as stills to be apprised, yet haunting, resisting definition, untranslatable…
It is no less a truism that walls can also circumscribe aloneness. Some prefer to hide behind them, or seek refuge within them, as I now do. And yet stronger still in me is the impulse to resist such artificial limitations to free movement and boundless new horizons. Surely it is not too late? Or has the wall been transposed into my mind, to form another kind of impediment?
Having transferred its palimpsest of secrets to this other site, what now remains to deter me from repainting it?
Perhaps I shall never paint it, because that would seem analogous to redecorating one's place of incarceration. I don't think it's cosy confinement I need, but liberation.
I think I have always been attempting to escape through walls.
Not to repaint it, then, but to demolish it?
But before I decide, I would like to know: does the wall represent the future or the past?
In a climate of uncertainty, this much seems certain: the wall has come to embody a dilemma.
Should I repaint it?
Should I demolish it?
Should I walk away from it?
Or should I leave it as it is, and simply try to ignore it?
The wall seems to be waiting for me to make up my mind about its fate.
October 2004