Gabriel Murray Read online

  Appointment in Vienna

  — by Gabriel Murray —

  I want the two images from Kraków to be first. May, love, poppet, if you outlive me and give a tinker’s damn—and I won’t hesitate to resurrect Ned Frye to harangue you if you don’t—you should remember.

  You do not have my permission to colorize. You do have my permission to rearrange. They were taken in order, but it interests me to imagine them either way; the brothers looking up, and then back down. The brothers engrossed, then unpleasantly aware. Nothing else in the scene signifies which came first: the shot is mostly rubble, without a great deal of living subject to speak of, no flag flapping nor dragonfly on its circuit. My beautiful composition of an ex-museum—I’m sure I already had the theme in mind—became two awkward shots of unfriendly children. It’s good to make the most of things.

  They dominate the frame—which is troublesome, because I hadn’t actually been intending to photograph them. But I was twenty-seven, wasn’t I? Seven-and-twenty and so chilly and weary; so ready to declare that I had arrived. That’s always been true of me. It is probably what allows me to stand it, any of it. Just ever supposing it must be over.

  Those should be at the beginning. Sandwich the title page. A little honor guard.

  I know there’s no input for me on the cover. I don’t care about the cover. If I were Ansel Adams you wouldn’t be slapping Glacier National Park on the cover and telling me to shut up. As I am not, you and that child you’ve got in place of Ned now are going to do that with something else anyway. I understand about Glacier National Park; no one with a coffee table purchases an Adams retrospective to stare contently at something he doesn’t recognize. Doubtless you will find something just as striking for your celebration of the journalistic life of Leslie Kincaid. Whatever it is that you manage to make of his work.

  * * *

  I think what really unites us in the service is a desire to confess. To scream our secrets into the reeds. What’s irritating is that I cannot think of a better way to put that. You’d think the Bible would have something to offer. I’m not religious, however. Even if you, or more searching parties, could get the truth out of me, none of you would be terribly surprised to find that I am agnostic. I fit the profile. Even if you scratch me, I fit the profile. I’m far too homosexual for God and too fucking sentimental for atheism.

  I’m sure I’ve heard some homilies. The word has a compulsory ring to it. Unfortunately, what I’ve heard far more of is classical references. You wouldn’t understand, May—the chief purpose of public school in the United Kingdom is to perfume the rotting corpse of antiquity. I could describe damned near anything in misattributed Latin.

  So with that in mind: I hear thieves want to be caught. This sounds like something a copper would say. But I do think spies all want to confess things. It’s why it’s so easy to get us to do it. The less attention-starved ones take their L-pills right off. If you get one of us, you have to know he is looking to tell you everything. I don’t know a man who got into the trade who harbors not even the faintest hope of spinning it into his memoirs. We’re the weakest possible solution of T. E. Lawrence hereabout.

  Including me. Certainly me.

  But that isn’t going to happen. No Kincaid retrospective is going to happen, and you won’t work on it. You won’t even get to be snide. I’ve got too many things to do now.

  * * *

  The collection would be called Appointment in Vienna: The Images of Leslie Kincaid, 1938-1965. To think, 1938—God in Heaven, I’d been a professional for all of a year? That was when our lot approached me, starting with our boys in French SOE. Is that what adulthood is: realizing that people lied to you? Admitting that you decided to believe them?

  Assets will do anything to feel special. So did I. Those were always my favorite bits of life: scholarships, positions, recruitment. Everyone likes to be chosen.

  The appointment is in Vienna instead of Samarra, of course. I like to imagine people wondering if I’d died in Vienna. I certainly would not mind dying in Vienna, or some other place nice, but I doubt I’ll have much selection. Still, I could drive my readers—I suppose perhaps I shouldn’t joke, but what does it matter?—I could drive my readers to wonder about my appointment with Death in Vienna. Especially when they page past the two boys in Kraków, staring at them, looking down, and discover that after my brief biography the first image is from Vienna in 1948. (My readers do basic math in their heads. Obviously I did not die in 1948.)

  It’s the ceiling of the Vienna Opera House, dazzling and cramped in concentric light. It is a heady thing to look at, or even just be under, and an excellent use for color film. Even standing underneath it feels a bit like champagne. Then they also furnish you with champagne. Mozart must’ve put them into a raving fever. You can think of what a fun place it would be to meet Death, if you liked.

  But Death is not about, just hundreds of ball-goers for the Viennese Opera Ball. You can’t see them, but you needn’t—you know as well as I that ballrooms are not lit just so, light and dark, for anything but a grand event. A ballroom in Vienna is for a ball; a photograph of an empty one is not “a photograph of a room” but “a photograph with a room empty of people.” It’s different.

  This one is full of life. I am wearing a dinner jacket but too distracted to care; I have turned my camera up to snap the ceiling, which dizzies me. I think I can feel the thickness of music. In fact I know little about music, and am starstruck. This is not an undercover task of any sort. I am just here to photograph wonderful excess. I’m having fun, in a lost way. I’ve lost the threads of fun, truly, by this point in my life, but I’m not immune to glamour. A gentleman is about to speak to me. I know he’s there—I can always feel the shape and presence of men, for reasons both human and pragmatic. I’m ignoring him to perfect my shot.

  You’ve never seen this photograph, May: I know, because no one has. I developed it and destroyed the negative, and then when I was packing up my room at the Grand Hotel Wien four days later I destroyed the print too. I destroy about nine-tenths of my work, do you know? It’s the dull stuff that I give you.

  * * *

  I suppose it’s been a decade now since I’ve finished a painting. I’m always behind the camera. No one who came up where I came up aspired to be a photojournalist, though—I drew, like anyone else.

  Children do not draw environments. I was no exception. Houses are where they contextualize people and animals. Any boy who likes to draw houses more than people or animals is disturbed. I was uninterested in animals—well, I was interested, I was interested in everything. Just not in drawing everything.

  I wanted to draw beautiful people. Lovely like Degas. Striking like Friedrich. When I had my first proper instruction the master told us that Degas and Friedrich, in fact, drew places, into which wanderers and ballerinas fit like every cloud. I didn’t believe him. I believe I didn’t understand how anyone could be inspired by the pure fact of a scene.

  It’s difficult to be so romantic as a photographer. Painters are always lying. We make our subjects brighter than they are, and when we take up photography we are amazed at how, in reality, people fade so disappointingly. Human extraordinariness does not tend to emphasize itself: it fits into the composition.

  Oh, May—May, you haven’t any idea how often I think of you. It’s very challenging not to think often of one’s editors. It’s a very embarrassing relationship that all of us in the newspaper business won’t admit to. I hope your years are well, in between my intermittent calls. I did always think you married a good fellow; your son is growing up so handsome now, too, but I’m afraid no woman can hear that from a homosexual without squinting, not even you. It’s all right. I don’t mind, not really; May, dar
ling, we’ve known or not-known each other for so long—tell me, do you ever suspect?

  I think of Vivian. You wouldn’t know her: we’re both in the trade. She runs the numbers, yes, but she has to lie about it. That’s the trade. Does she ever wonder?

  She doesn’t. I know she doesn’t. We’re all too busy scrutinizing all our boys for Bolshevism, understandably. If it’s all just volleys between ourselves and Moscow, there’s no need to look for other ways to turn. But everyone turns, May—statistics bear it out, we both know. Nothing is ever the way you left it. Not your room. Not your mother. Not Liberty Leading the People (despite the Louvre’s most valiant, expensive efforts). Not me, yes, but that’s not the point—you cannot just leave everything in this world and expect it, however uneasily, to remain.

  * * *

  I suppose that sounds like a moral apologia. It is. It’s not something I dwell on anymore—the morality of all things is depressingly simple. It’s the logistics that occupy me. I have so much to do now. I don’t even sketch anymore, in my bedroom.

  * * *

  Two pages on Vienna, explaining. Then we turn the page and we’re in the brown downtown of Hagerstown, Maryland—

  —home to the Dorsey-Palmer House and the Maryland Theatre; all English-language high culture is similar, even in how the word is spelled—

  —where once I met a boy and flirted with him, push-pull, as he shied laughing away: playacting seducing him/resisting me, as though anyone anywhere cared a whit for his purity or mine, or thought it even existed; as though brothers and nuns were possessive of the likes of us—

  I was in Hagerstown for other reasons: certainly not to flirt. Flirting plays a substantially smaller role than you’d imagine in any of my careers. I went to a soda fountain and had a malt and listened to the boys and girls talk; you can hear the American South, but it grows ever quieter. I can’t say I’m sad. They can find someone else for that elegy.

  I remember the soda and the conversation because after I had them, I went outside and snapped that photograph. Otherwise I wouldn’t.

  This was a boy, actually: seventeen or eighteen, high school, letterman jacket. And I suppose I did flirt. His friends had moved further away down the bar and he was smiling at me and sneaking a few glances—well, I’m worth glancing at. I smiled back at him and decided to be American. “You don’t have the time, do you?”

  He grinned: “You don’t trust the wall clock?”

  “I’m out here from California—I had to go through the Rockies. Trust me, once you deal with that time zone situation,” I leaned on my elbow, “you learn to get a second opinion.”

  We chatted. His name was . . . God . . . he told it to me. Sam or Stephen. Within ten minutes he was telling me about the town and what I should look at while I was here for my aviation business; he pointed out that pretty old Dorsey-Palmer House and even the Masonic Hall down the street, which he spoke of in a mocking hush (“They say it’s a compass, the math kind, but it’s probably a pyramid. You know how it is with weirdos and pyramids.”) and speculated on which of his friends’ dads were involved.

  “Everyone likes three,” I said, affable. “And Egypt and stuff that makes sense, and that probably accounts for the Freemasons altogether. Alchemists, medieval fake magicians, you know they used to believe in somebody or something called Hermes Trismegistus—thrice-great Hermes. Like the Greek god, but no actual relation. I think that’s where you get hermetic from. Don’t quote me.” (He could quote me all he liked. It is.) “But at the end of the day, no one could tell you what that meant or what in God’s name alchemy was supposed to be doing. So if it makes you feel any better, people’s friends’ dads have been pretending to do important things probably since we invented the wheel.”

  His eyes shone. “Yeah. You’re right.” Then dulled: “Well, my dad’s a fucking plumber,” he said to his malt.

  Ah, to be seventeen and queer and bubbling with hate you push down to talk bored Americana, impress a stylish man. I understood and understand; my dad was an electrician.

  The truth is Americans don’t need Masonic structures to summon the devil, and neither do we. I photographed the brown, squatting, friendly-and-dying downtown of Hagerstown, Maryland because it reminded me of an old Irish setter: but, really, because it was a growing hub for a certain sort of tourism. It is a nexus of Confederate losses. From there you can drive to Antietam, Gettysburg. Harpers Ferry, though they don’t speak John Brown’s name there. It’s not heroes that they honor there, nor the sad and desperate and called to God—just resentful memory, the dinner jacket they put on living hate.

  In Vienna I suppose they bother to lie. I photographed Hagerstown because I liked the colors and I fancied myself a spiritualist making daguerreotypes—I’d develop it and the dead would be vindicated. But they aren’t, they’re nowhere; streets are empty, empty, empty. I do not know where the dead go, but the killers are always here.

  * * *

  We live in a laundered world, May: now more than ever. All you remember is the Blitz, studying basement ceilings and wondering if you were going to die; I, however, have met people in Vienna whose dossiers we’d pore over in rooms in Châteauroux, before we burned the papers and ran once more. People we almost killed. People we would have. I suppose they missed their appointments, didn’t they? I can’t remember my grandmother’s face, but I know who’s lying about what they did in the war. In Austria—most everyone. In Britain, maybe seventy percent of that. I know. I know.

  Soon I won’t have to know anymore. I understand in this world that no one really lays down their arms; all they can hope for is not to pick them up in the first place. That’s too late for me—but I will be the first. I will lay them down at the end of my fight. There is a kingdom I have been to; I have seen the other face of tomorrow, which has only ever revealed itself at day’s end.

  * * *

  All the old expatriates say that dead old Berlin was something I would have liked, something that will never be seen again. In Britain we make a cottage industry out of the maudlin. But I think the old Germans are telling the truth. That is, I think they believe themselves. Christopher Isherwood is such a hit with that crowd—I feel like I know more German escapees who can quote Goodbye to Berlin in English than can describe their own long gone childhood homes. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. It’s probably the best thing Isherwood ever did for anyone—giving them something to miss.

  Me, I never saw that Berlin. I’m—was—too young; I only spent six months there, posting negatives back to London, and they pulled me out after the Pogromnacht and sent me to Paris instead. If there was an old Paris to miss, I never saw it either. Salons and cabarets, yes, and all filled with people talking about war.

  You should pay attention to this period when you’re compiling, May. My published work then, when I was twenty to twenty-one, contains all stuff that was purely for its own sake, which one cannot say for anything since. Or, well, for journalism’s sake—for truth’s! For justice’s! (God. To think.)—I suppose that’s also true of my student work, but don’t anthologize my student work, for pity’s sake, it’s pathetic and I think I modeled a St Paul after a lecturer I fancied. But 1938-1939, a year and a half of shining simpleton adult professional photojournalism for you. A relic of Old Leslie. Goodbye to Me.

  Since then I’m afraid it’s all been a cover. That’s what we call a lie, love, in the service: like the stuff of our lives is a bedsheet, or sturdy paper.

  It was in France where the door opened. I sometimes wonder how long they’d been considering me—but what a flattering notion. Of course it couldn’t have been long. To SOE and the Secret Service I was an opportunity in the right place. I understand. I select for the same things now: opportunity.

  She talked to me at a party, and then by the Seine: “Mr. Kincaid,” she turned the handle of her umbrella, bundled tight, in her hands: “You said you want to help.”

  By then, I knew what she meant.

  “The things tha
t are happening in our lifetime have never seen an equal before,” said Geraldine Rinn, as I suppose I must have called her. “If we do not stop them here, they will become inexorable. You’ve no idea what the fascists are doing. You’ve no idea what they’re going to do.”

  Our names have a tendency to flake and slough. Since this is all between you and me, dear, I shall say that her name is Elaine Paxton, or it’s certainly on her passport and half of it on her birth certificate. She’s married to that Paxton, yes, you can have that scandal if you like.

  She’s supposed to know everything about me too.

  “I have an idea,” said I, twenty-one: defensive, like it or I mattered.

  “You do not.” She sniffed—correct, of course, but how did she know the reprimand wouldn’t drive me off? Because this was her job, too. Because someone had talked to her as well, a long time ago. “Mr. Kincaid, I mean no disrespect to your profession. I know you feel called to it. You place a high value on the truth and you hope that its revelation can undo the worst of hypocrisies.”

  Glib, but not wrong. “More or less,” I hedged.

  “Your documentations will not convince anyone who is not already convinced,” said Elaine, Geraldine. “The British and American peoples are accustomed to hardening their hearts and covering their ears. There is no atrocity you can show them. But there is another difference you can make.”

  * * *

  We should have an image of Birmingham in here. I don’t need to backtrack for that one, because the truth is I didn’t photograph Birmingham until I was an adult returning. The last thing I’d, personally, got into art for was to capture my brown, clamoring little hell-world. I should have. The Blitz tore a lot down—the house where I lived, the school I attended, the hospital where I was born. I’ve never felt much for them, though: just the strangeness in knowing that there was once an interior space, a closet under the staircase, where I’d sit in the dark and listen to Stephen’s voice bellowing as he pounded around looking for me so he could regale me with something, or Mum cursing my lateness to supper—just me, the crashing of people on the stairs, and that treacherous sliver of light, back when I thought the most luscious reward I could want was to be really and truly alone.