Ash Cinema Read online

  Many of them were about me or at least contained bits of me and our life. I Wish He Belonged to Me, . . . And then the Rain, Au Revoir, mes Enfants, and Euripides followed the tale of our short love and long friendship in great detail albeit hidden beneath all the magic and calamity of his apocalyptic vision of the world and humanity. . . . And then came the Rain dealt with his many failed relationships with women exclusively and he never even tried to hide it behind a curtain like he did with the others. Through it I met the women who loved him but who he never could bring himself to love back and there I am at the center of it like the eye of his romantic hurricane but also the one who caused the storm and tore the world apart.

  I can't read that one anymore and only read it the first time when it showed at my door.

  Au Revoir, mes Enfants was the last to be published and it came on the tenth anniversary of his death. He planned it all, didn't you? You knew what you were doing before we ever even had a chance. You looked a decade in advance and smiled when you took knife to throat. If there's any comfort in any of it then it must be that you believed in yourself at the end. Finally. It was your goodbye and meditation on suicide and Death and what it meant. More an essay than a novel in that even the narrator's name was Marcel Maddox who had a long history of failed love but was so full of it that life lost all the meaning that he searched for so long.

  Miho's biography came out the following year and I believe he planned that, too. His relationship was never sexual or romantical with Miho but I believe he loved her and she loved him. Maybe most of all. Maybe even more than he loved me. Poor Helena is what I often thought after all of this. Poor Helena who had been with him the last two years of his life. She never understood and it tore her apart more than the rest of us. She even came to my door a few years after his death and during my divorce. Of course it didn't help reconciliation with Terry that I talked for two days about the man who loved me enough to take me from him even after dying.

  Helena met Marcel in Germany while he was scouring libraries for Kurosawa's full print of The Idiot. She became caught in his mad wake the way many women fell to him. He ate the hearts of every woman he ever met and they loved him deeply for his eccentricity and genius and electricity and beauty but they never loved him for being Marcel.

  It's the secret no one knows but Miho and me. It's why he loved us. We didn't care that he was an artist or that he lived his life the way he did which was surely extravagant and magnificent but we loved him for the man that he was when no one was around.

  I never heard Miho utter a word of English but in reading her book I knew more about her love likely than she. Marcel treated her poorly at first and refused to allow her to follow him. She had discovered him in Beirut while he dug through discarded reels for I can't remember what. Maybe nothing the way I sometimes dig through discount bins in case I get lucky. He bought her a drink because she's pretty and he spoke fragments of Japanese but she would teach him much more. After a week of friendship wherein they never stopped talking she decided to follow him and tell his tale. Like him she was lost in the movies and barely here in the proper world where life doesn't have three acts and resolutions.

  He made it hard on her and constantly tried to lose her for their first two years but she never stopped and though she doesn't say why it became obvious to me after the first page of her book. After all the running and following he grew to accept her as his partner in life.

  Miho, I've known you all these years but never met you. You're my life partner, the only friend I have and maybe the only one I ever did, but I don't know you.

  I had no words and didn't speak because it was always him, Marcel, who had words, not just for me and for him, but for all of us. All the world spoke through his mouth.

  Tell me.

  Tell you what, I said.

  Tell me who you are.

  Depressed and despondent, he lied in bed for days and didn't eat anything or wash. I brought him meals and juice but he refused everything besides water. I turned on films to rouse him but he rioted and demanded I turn them off and he told me not to come back but I always did, only to sit next to his bed and wait. Wait for what came next. And in that moment that lasted for weeks, he wanted to know me, the woman who had stayed by him for most a decade while he raced across the globe searching for Sebastian Falke who we never found. He told me, not as a demand, but sincerely, to let him inside my life the way he had given his life to me all these years.

  And I told him and when I was done he held me for the first and only time. The only time our bodies touched.

  And he called me his Moon. He was the shore.

  It was the month before his thirtieth birthday. The book ends shortly after that. It ends with flowers and tears on his grave and Miho promising the rest of her life to his dream, to give what was left of hers to the life of Sebastian Falke.

  ***

  Miho never spoke to me in words. By all accounts she only spoke in actions and that's how my correspondence with her has been, albeit one sided. I never have been able to track her or discover even a whisper of her whereabouts but she knows where I am and sends me something of his every Christmas. Sometimes it's only a slip of paper and sometimes it's pages from a journal he once kept. She sends me the words that she knows matter to me which are the ones about our youth. Tender memories every Christmas and because of it I cry at least once a year.

  These gifts are the only reason I know that Miho still lives and searches for Sebastian Falke. Sebastian Falke, cinema's rogue auteur who disappeared and turned to a ghost before anyone cared.

  ***

  When Marcel returned from California several months later we met again.

  'Did you find him?'

  'Only a name etched in stone.'

  'Oh.'

  'All traces of him, gone.' He threw his hand out and opened it up as if indicating a puff of smoke. 'We even thought we may have found a place where his films were, at this little library in I don't remember where. We got there and found nothing. The librarians had never watched the films but acknowledged that they were real and housed in their stacks. I told them they were gone but they didn't believe me so I showed them the god damn stack of movies. Not a single one by Sebastian Falke, just a bunch of Disney movies and the like.' Miho stood behind him and looked down at me. Her porcelain face betraying no emotion. She always appeared as a statue to me. Something that a master artisan crafted out of marble and moonlight.

  'Then the librarian tells me about a teenage girl who used to watch them over and over a few years ago. She said she remembered her specifically because she watched those strange movies where people never spoke and because she smelt homeless. But there was no girl and no more films and no way to track a homeless girl in California. She stole the tapes that had been sitting on that shelf for at least a decade and now they're lost out in the gutters. I, we, searched there, too, for months but it's hopeless.' His movements erratic and shifting between almost convulsive to immobile.

  'So what now?' We were twenty five and I barely knew him anymore and it made me shy and confused to be near. Our past and our present swirled around us and a glance now became a look from seven years before and the movement of his hand made us sixteen again or the way he bit his lip made us strangers which is what we were then.

  He leaned back and stretched his arms causing Miho to step back and they somehow never touched, 'No idea. Miho thinks we should take a break. Maybe stick around here for a while or go back home.'

  'Where's home,' my voice shook from fear of what he may have considered home by then.

  You smiled for the first time and you were holding a gastank and matches again, 'Home. Our home. Maybe go see my parents and yours.'

  The heat burst through my chest and covered every inch of my face and then he laughed the same old laugh, 'Where did you think?'

  I pulled on my hair and covered my mouth with it hiding my smile, 'I don't know.'

  He laughed and so did I and I forgot Miho wa
s there.

  'You still sound like a girl when you laugh.'

  'I'm still the same boy.'

  Were you? I wondered then and wonder now if it was only me that changed or if it was the space between us that had changed.

  ***

  Terry came home with me to stay with our parents and to tell them I was pregnant. Finally, my mother said and hugged Terry. Pap shook his hand only and nodded.

  'I talked to Marcel yesterday,' Pap told me.

  'They talked all day,' mum rolled her eyes but smiled big. 'He's become a real man.'

  'And what a life!' Pap never lost his love for you. He talked about you all through the day and about Miho who never seemed to leave your side then. Pap and mum talked so long about you that Terry got forgotten and it was as if the baby I housed in my womb was there now because you had returned home and not because of the love Terry and I shared.

  It was a hard week on Terry and those slivers of distance between us turned to cracks that allowed many trouble to seep into our short marriage. He didn't like the time I spent with you.

  'He was my best friend and only barely returned. I've seen him only a handful of times in five years so of course I want to spend time with him.'

  'You're not married to him.'

  'That's why it shouldn't bother you.'

  Terry was angry but he was a gentle man and bottled things he was afraid to say because he never wanted to hurt me even when the divorce happened. He let me have anything I wanted so long as we shared custody of Genevieve. Only thing was that I didn't want anything. Not the house or the money or the car.

  Rough shape. That's how I was in the days of the divorce and it wasn't Terry's fault or anybody's except for mine and all the regret I didn't even know was in me concerning you. It took me years to believe it wasn't me that killed you. Years.

  Terry believed I loved you still and I did but not how he meant. Even when I stopped loving you I always loved you but it wasn't the way you wanted either.

  We walked through the woods the way we used to and you lit two cigarettes and handed me one.

  'Baby.'

  Talking through the side of your mouth because of the cigarette in your teeth, 'What?'

  'I'm pregnant.' I flushed and watched our feet.

  'Oh, shit. Seriously?'

  I nodded.

  You spat out the cigarette and tossed the one for me down.

  I couldn't meet your eyes but felt them on me.

  'How long?'

  'Only found out a few weeks ago.'

  It was late summer. August I think. The air was dry and hot and the only sound was our feet kicking dirt. Even here you stayed dressed well, in pants, a collared shirt, and those leather shoes.

  'If I was young, I'd run from here.'

  'You did.'

  'You came with.' The smile was evident in your voice and I realized it was the first time I had seen you in so long without Miho's presence. Ever since you came back Miho was always beside you even though she never spoke. At least not to me. My parents said she was funny. I can't imagine that. Sometimes I forget that pretty women are normal people like the rest of us and that they can be funny or angry or sad too. To me Miho will always be that statuesque beauty from somewhere I can't pronounce in a country I've never seen but for video.

  'I hated you for a while after you left.'

  'I know.'

  'Even before you went to France, I lost you.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  I didn't look up but knew from your voice that you watched the ground before us go by as I did.

  'It really hurt me.'

  You paused and said nothing for a while and then, 'I know.' But the pause mattered more than what came next. That single pause held all the anguish of your years away from me. The loneliness you found so deep within that no woman you met could ever fill it and make you whole because you gave too much away to me when we were only children. I'm sorry, Marcel. I didn't know then. I knew but I didn't know how deep it cut and how fractured your heart had grown. Later, years later, you told me that all your heart had splintered and broken to pieces but for the part that separated ventricles which is at the very center. 'It belongs to you and every beat, even since before I met you, has been for you.'

  It's why I couldn't see you die.

  I belonged to another but you always had me.

  'You don't deserve to be lonely, Gina.' These words broke me from all the thoughts sweeping through me from the forest. The voices of the treespirits were loud that day but you never heard them and I never told you.

  How long will you stay with me is what they said and I didn't understand that till today.

  ***

  We remained there for a week when he and Miho left once more to keep chasing Sebastian Falke. Some words need to be said about Sebastian Falke.

  I don't believe he ever really did exist and I wouldn't put it past Marcel making the whole thing up because if he believed strong enough he could make the whole world believe along with him. And I never have heard a word about him since Marcel spent that week and that Christmas before telling me about him and the work he may or may not have created. The thing is too that even Marcel never saw any evidence of his work outside of hearsay and reviews and the odd person he sought down to ask about this unfamed filmmaker. Never did he lay eyes on a film. Not one.

  Everything I know about him was from Marcel and he was obsessed enough to spend the last third of his life devoted to discovering him.

  Sebastian Falke was the director of ten short films and one feature length film. His films were reviled and lauded often at the same times, it seems. I can't tell it right even though I'm trying. It reads like a book report and losing the magic of his, Marcel's, words. His eye went wide and bright and he leant forward as if he looked over a great precipice that towered above the ocean and within that ocean was Sebastian Falke floundering and if only Marcel could keep leaning and keep reaching and keep looking then he would find that single wave that would take Sebastian Falke from the edge of dreams and the ghosts of the past and recreate him the way I try now to bring you back from your death that seems so long ago but closer with each sentence I write.

  At night in the shadows, I believe they are yours.

  Winter has come upon me and so I still haven't finished but I feel as if you're closer to me than you have been in years or even decades. I think that if only I can make sense of Sebastian Falke then you will come up from behind and place a hand to my shoulder like you did when I was lost in my thoughts at the library. I forget so much about you. The way you smell. I had forgotten for so long that I did not recognize it when it drifted to me some months ago whilst walking amongst the woods. The treespirits have become leery of me when I bring paper out there as they fear that I will read to them once more even though I promised not to again and again.

  Humans lie when they live is all they say to that.

  Who is Sebastian Falke.

  'He disappeared because no one understood. He spoke the language of dreams, the language ecstatic, of visuals, the way he painted and crafted each scene and moved the camera so effortlessly as if his eye was made of water and every action became fluid and dynamic. A master of editing and extended shots that lasted the length of the film, which is partly why he made short films. They didn't have reels that lasted long enough to do a feature in a single take, and I think that's what he was after, pushing the grammar and syntax of cinema beyond what anyone thought it could be. He learned from Hitchcock in that regard but went further because he was more pure in terms of aesthetics. Hitchcock and every other filmmaker to ever push record on the camera hasn't understood that words have no place on camera. Asia has understood this or never forgot it because film was perfect when it began. Unbridled visuals unhampered by the muck and mire of vocal communication, by linguistics. The language of film has been intact since its inception, since still frames were first made, but when sound could be added, the world went for it because everyone always believes
that more is more, forgetting the old adage that less is so. And that's what it comes down to. Sebastian Falke never bothered with dialogue. Rather, he focused on the language that does not lie. The language of bodies in motion and the language of the eye. He used audition but only for music and sound, never for words because words can never tell the truth or even half of it. Words are masks, a way to hide and cover what we mean. But, like I said, the Asian filmmakers, the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans understand film better because, I think, it's not natural to them in that they didn't conceive of it but were given it. Of course, not all Asian film does this properly and never was there a man as daring as Sebastian Falke to forego completely the use of dialogue in a film, but that's why he matters and deserves memory. He deserved to be lonely. It's what killed him. We forgot his life and work. There is nothing worse for an artist than the passage of time in silence.' Marcel's voice trailed off then and we were at the front door of my parents' where Terry and I stayed that week. It was the last day home. I felt fifteen again. We never touched the many hours we talked in the woods that week. Never did our skin meet the other's but I made another promise when we reached my door. I made a promise that if your note--I knew there would be one--said I love you then I would find you and maybe we would be happy. Finally.

  You left the next day. 'Sebastian Falke may be dead, but his life is out there,' he turned to Miho, 'and we'll find it.'

  The note simply said, I burn for you.