The author of a new book on Tarkovsky perceptively writes of the folds in time that unfold and refold on screen: an eight minute shot with a still camera and Gorchakov first sitting, then lying down lasts for the whole night. It is dawn that is lightening the last minute, and the Alsation who wandered into the shot and disappeared must have come from his dreams or his memories. It was space we saw, but also time. Time made visible; the pressure of time made real. A night passed; eight minutes passed. The room darkened, then lightened. A dog came and went: time, a secret pleat of time. More: a pleat that opened inside to outside. That exposed, shared, Gorchakov's dreams or memories. We see them; we are privy to them. We are there at the crossroads of the night, where the soul is lost. What happened? What is happening? Gorchakov's outside himself and where are we who see him?
I have never liked afternoons, and have always sought to brace myself against them. The afternoon! Make it the busiest part of the day, schedule things to do - meetings, administrative work - but it's still out there, out of the window. Out there - dissipation, that vague fraying that seems to undo tasks from within. What's the point of this, or that? What's it all for? Those are the questions the afternoon asks in you. Asks and answers them as it melts you into the air. You're out there, too: outside, even as you sit inside your office. A pleat of the afternoon has opened to claim you. Or the darkness closed inside you is also of the afternoon. It was there already. It waited for you, knew you. Perhaps only the afternoon knows your name.
It was always afternoon that I knocked on your door. The afteroon ... it drew me there, that's what I thought. You were ill, unemployed - and what was I? Unemployed, ill - and for how long? It didn't matter. A week was a month, a month a lifetime. Weren't we entirely too light for the world? Light, our lives lightened, the afternoon burning us away like night mists on a lake.
You had a black and white TV, I remember that. Who else had such a TV, black and white? It was 1998 - was that the year? Or '99? A black and white TV: it was almost defiant. You didn't care for television, you said. You disapproved, it was never on. But it was on, I knew that. Couldn't I hear voices through the door as I knocked? Didn't I always know you were there?
I used to knock at the door. Afternoon - on what day? Any day. Every day. How could you tell them apart? I knocked - where were you? I could hear voices, quiet voices. And then there you were. There - and there I was, solidified from the day, born for you like a crystal. 'Fancy a walk?' or 'Do you want to go for a walk?' or 'I'm going to the meadows - do you want to come?'
You at the door, narrow eyed. You from your dark house to the door, to the brightness of the day: you were never ready for it. Never awake enough. 'Yeah, okay' or 'All right then' or 'Go on': said with your eyes narrowed. Said with your hand over your eyes to shield them. The day, what was it asking for from you? What did the afternoon want?
I never knew what you did inside, not really. You'd inherited your house. That was before I met you, long ago, a lifetime ago. You were going to work on it, you said. Have some work done. There was a lot to do, you sighed. Your mother had died there, and then your father. And whose turn was it now? But no one was going to die, not now. How could the afternoon ever be brought to a close? A writer faces eternity or the lack of it every day, said Hemmingway, but what does the non-writer see? Eternity or its absence. Eternity or the afternoon, the endless afternoon.
You were ill, unemployed. Your unemployment benefit became sick benefit. You were ill now, just as I was. Ill, both ill with malaise as vague and undefinable as the day. Ill - but what with? With too many afternoons. With the wideness of the sky. We'd been left behind, somehow. Soldiers forgotten at an outpost. Undercover agents without handlers. Who were we now? Who were we supposed to be?
You were part of some writer's workshop, I knew that. You were busy with a few things, you said. You'd like to write, you said, but you weren't sure what. And I thought, nothing you write will ever answer to what you've become. You'll never be able to find it, your lightness, in writing I thought, and nor will I. What were we to write, either of us? Every line was a lie. Every sentence. Unless you let it trail off, unfinished. Unless you began by not writing, by not even beginning. Writing and non-writing would cancel one another out. The Word and the non-Word. In the beginning, there was ... but what was there? The afternoon, the non-eternity of the afternoon.
'I'd like to write something' - but what? What would you write, in the afternoon when all stories fall apart? 'I'd like to write' - but we were too weak for stories, both of us. No story would come to find us, we should have known that. How could a page written by our hand lift itself into eternity? Or a single complete sentence? There were no plans that could withstand the afternoon.
You watched television in the half-darkness of your house. I knocked on the door, and you came to answer it, eyes half closed against the light. 'Want to come to the meadows?' You said, okay, you'd come. You said, I'll be there in a sec. You said, hang on a minute. The half-darkness inside. Voices. Daytime TV. And a notebook. Was there a notebook open somewhere? A notebook open in the air, the afternoon air, a breeze ruffling its pages?
Let the light write, I thought. Let the afternoon brown the pages gently. That would be evidence enough, I thought. Not that you'd been there, that you'd begun a story or written a shopping list. But that no one had been there, that no one wrote or read. The afternoon: was it there on the page? The afternoon: had it left its mark on the page?
I remember what we talked about, I have a good memory. I turn memories over all the time in my head. I remember too much, I tell myself, and only I remember it. What's left of this time for you? 'I took some time off', you could say. 'My dad died and I took some personal time', you could say. 'I took a couple of years off' ... I think you went back to work. I think you found your way back.
Do you think of me now, who used to knock on your door? I was never part of your social circle, was I? Never one of your regular friends. An occasional caller. I knocked on your door every now and again. I wasn't part of your group - your workshop, that's what it was called. Your writer's workshop - you kept it to yourself, really. It wasn't something you spoke about much. 'I'd like to write something', you said, and left it at that. Something, and one day. And meanwhile?
You got a job, that's what I heard. That was the rumour, anyway. I hardly knew anyone who knew you. Someone who knew someone, who knew someone ... Anyway, you weren't to be found inside in the day anymore. And hadn't I found something to do? Hadn't time unslackened itself and begun to move forward? Immune, that's the word I want to use of you. You were immune to those afternoons, to those years without work. How do you remember them? What place do they have in your memory? Does the afternoon return to unsettle you? Does its non-eternity unfold in your minutes and hours?
I have your journal, I imagine. I have it, the notebook in which you began to write and broke off. I have it, whose pages are almost all empty, where what writing there is hardly seems to mark it. You wrote in pencil - why is that? And you handwriting is so small - why is that? Because what you wrote could fade. Because it could be forgotten, what you wrote and everything you would want to write. I remember your lightness. I remember our conversations were inconsequential. Without consequence, without importance, talking of this, then that ... that was the marvel. Nothing was said to disturb the day. Nothing that raised itself higher than the afternoon.
I have your journal, I imagine, and all your thoughts. I turn the pages. A few notes, in pencil, in tiny handwriting, and then? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Blank pages. Pages I imagine that turned by themselves in the wind. Pages that answered by their blankness the blankness of the sky. Obscure correlate. An answer without resolution. How had you brought the afternoon to your notebook? How had you made it lie down there, in your notebook?
We used to walk out along the river, quite far, almost all the way to Didsbury. Along it, the river, to Didsbury and the Botanical Gardens. In what year? When was it that we walked out past the meadows and along the river? Talking of nothing in particular. Of music, of current affairs, but filling our topics with lightness, lightening them. Loosing them into the afternoon like balloons. What were we except for a way in which the afternoon could know itself? What except a way for the afternoon to speak and to lighten itself by speaking?
Your notebook, with its blank pages, its silence. Your notebook - was it yours - where the afternoon curled up and slept like a cat. I have a good memory, I think. I remember too much, but the afternoon remembers more. I can see its arches now, reaching far above me. The afternoon, an immense, impersonal archive. The afternoon that shimmers within everything that has happened. Everything that happened will happen here. And everything will be forgotten here, including everything I've remembered, including the fact that I lived and you lived, and that there ever was a meadow and a path and a river and Didsbury and the Botanical Gardens.
Eternity, the lack of it. And I imagine that the afternoon is insinuated into non-writing, and the writing that remembers what it is not. How to join the Word and the non-Word? How to begin writing of what does not begin? I would like to place a fold in these words and these sentences. Would like for writing to unfold in another direction, blooming into itself. As though it was the afternoon had fallen asleep here. As though it was writing and it was dreaming, and that both you and I were dreamt by the afternoon, its fantasy. I would like to live, said the afternoon, and we were born. I would like to speak, said the afternoon, and we spoke. And I would like to write, said the afternoon, and you wrote.