John Berger - Lilac and Flag

Who does the drawing off?

One of my nurses does. You bring the client.

How much do you pay?

Eight thousand a litre. I told you.

No, to the client.

If you’ve done your work properly, she or he believes she’s getting free treatment! They think they’re getting something for nothing. I’ve got three surgeries. One in Chicago, one off Alexanderplatz, and one by Olympia. Open every day between two and ten at night.

Do I get a retainer?

You refused it, my friend, three times. You didn’t want any cheesecake. Think it over. Quanto fa, Signorina?

That afternoon Sucus practiced listening for the two silences on Zsuzsa. She rolled up her sleeve and he wound the elastic wrapping around her long, thin arm. The right arm. He loved her arms like other men love money. They promised everything he could imagine.

They were in the Blue House, sitting on the mattress on the floor, with the lace over the pillows. He placed the little black disc on her artery, in the crook of her arm. Now he could hear her heart reverberating like a pile driver and the sound made him smile. He pressed the rods of the stethoscope further into his ears.

Across the room, the door to Naisi’s HQ was open and Naisi was lying on his bed with his eyes shut, calculating.

Zsuzsa, are you there? he asked. You haven’t forgotten the audition tomorrow at three?

How could I? she replied.

Don’t let it mess your mind, he said.

Sshhh! hissed Sucus, stop talking! I can’t hear.

Am I making you go deaf, Flag? Too many beats?

Be quiet! I can’t hear. There! It’s gone quiet. Thirteen. Now for the lower one. The d-i-a-stol-ic …

No need to be worried, sister, said Naisi, it’s only a gazupie, nothing more.

Sshh! It’s eight!

Later, Sucus and Zsuzsa strolled down Rat Hill towards the headland. It was sunny, with the special light of an autumn afternoon, when everything cast such dark and long shadows that the earth, and all that was standing on it, looked as if it was slipping towards the sun. The wind was blowing the stench of the tanneries out to sea. The washing, hung out since the morning, was already dry. Hens sat drowsy in the shade. Nobody was queuing up with plastic containers at the hydrants because, since September, water had been cut off every afternoon between three and six. In the blind pigs, only the damned were drinking. There was an autumn calm over the shanty town. Against the sky, the television aerials at the top of the hill looked like the shipwrecked masts of a fleet of toy boats.

They passed a girl on the path practicing with a hula hoop, trying to keep it up on her hips. Zsuzsa stopped to show her how to do it, then ran after Sucus and, pressing herself against him, did her disappearing trick.

She’s gone, she whispered in his ear, you won’t find her if you turn round, she’s gone! For ever!

She knew that pressing herself like this against the back of his legs excited him, and today she found it funny. His joke was getting bigger. She laughed, neighing through her nostrils on the nape of his neck, where his hair needed cutting. He looked like a mooch. She must cut it for him before he began on Alexanderplatz. Bigger and bigger grew his joke, and his ears were going red too. Suddenly, she sidestepped, ran in front, and turned to face him. Her brass earrings, the ones big enough to pass a lemon through, were swinging like church bells at a wedding. I love you, she said, and kissed him. He lifted her off the ground.

And I weep, as old women do, seeing everything beginning again and remembering.

It was a mystery why there were always so many people on Alexanderplatz. There was the bus station, but this couldn’t explain the crowds at night. Perhaps people went there simply because it was so big. Perhaps the bare, empty space, which was not like that of a park, compelled crowds to gather there, according to some natural law of men and streets and Man. All cities have one such space, where victories are celebrated, where crowds dance at the new year, where political marches begin and end, a space that belongs to the people, just as the buildings with pillars and carvings belong to the rich. When you cross it, it’s like crossing a stage. On this stage, in times of summary justice, tyrants and traitors are hanged from lamp posts. The eternal audience are the poor, all the poor of the past and all the poor of the future, among whom there are many who go straight to heaven, if you want an old woman’s opinion.

The kiosks and stands around the edge of the great open space sold newspapers, Coca-Cola, silver spoons, scarves, furry animals, cassettes, T-shirts with I ALEXANDERPLATZ printed on them, saffron, cameras, lace lingerie, cowboy hats, posters, toy buses like the real ones in the bus station, wigs, beer, sunflower seeds, electronic calculators. And the crowds were as diverse and strange as the things to be bought. Telling the difference between the villagers who had just arrived by bus and those who had come generations ago was easy. It was enough, if they were men, to look at their footwear, and, if they were women, to look at their hair. A question of thickness in both cases. The Trojans believed in thin, fine things.

A massive bronze statue with a fountain dominated the western end of the platz. Around this statue flew and alighted hundreds of pigeons, attracted by the vendors who sold packets of grain for visitors to feed them with.

The statue was of a sailor standing on a rock talking to an Aegean mermaid. She was Aegean because her tail divided into three. The sailor’s head was covered with lime from the pigeons, and this made his hair grey. The mermaid was protected from the bird shit since water flowed all over her, but the water had turned the bronze of her body green. According to legend, she was asking the sailor: Where is the great Alexander? And the sailor, according to legend, always told the mermaid: He lives and he reigns!

Nobody knew where. But the fountain was reproduced on hundreds of souvenirs — from rubber car mats to women’s brooches. It was at the foot of the bronze sailor that people, if they failed to meet in the crowd, would find each other.

Was the statue so famous because it offered a consolation concerning death? Alexander died, burnt out, in Babylon at the age of thirty-two; and yet, after twenty-four centuries, the green mermaid still wanted news of him!

Sucus arrived early in the morning with a folding chair which Naisi had given him. Naisi had six of these chairs stacked in a corner of his HQ. They had disappeared from the private beach of the Hotel Atlantic during a storm.

Sucus chose a pitch within sight of the other blood-jobbers, but somewhat closer to the statue. He judged that he would be able to observe things better from there. He slipped on his white coat, unfolded the chair, and sat down, the sphygmomanometer across his knees and the stethoscope round his neck. A few passersby glanced at him, a few scowled, none stopped.

At the end of Alexanderplatz, where the buses were, a man sat on the ground, his back to a tree, against which two crutches were leaning. Arranged on the earth around him like a fan lay copies of the revolutionary newspaper Milestone .

Always thin, Murat looked even thinner. His face had become a mask hiding another world. When passengers got down from the buses, he looked up and repeated: Milestone! Two hundred zloti! Milestone! The front-page headline read: TROJAN WORKERS REFUSE INTIMIDATION!

Murat believed humanity would advance towards a juster future he would not live to see. Perhaps his children would. If not them, his grandchildren. Meanwhile people had need of Milestone ’s message. Whenever he arrived at this thought, he did his best to sell the paper by crying out its name. The rest of the time, seated on the ground, lost in the immensity of his compassion, he watched the feet of the people passing.