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Two Photographs
‘Look. Look, Quick. Take a photograph. Now!’ I said. It was 25 May 1985, “Youth Day”, a national holiday in former Yugoslavia. Lara, aged seventeen, was standing on my right, cradling camera and guidebook, her attention elsewhere. Two rapid looks swept across her face when I nudged her, First, a cocking of the head and raising of the left eyebrow, that long-suffering daughterly look that says, ‘What’s he on about now?’ Then, as she turned and saw the butterfly preening itself on my finger, blue wings folded upright, completely unperturbed by the crowd milling, pressing around us, waiting to get into the jam-packed museum, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped, in a mirror of my own amazement. ‘But it’s too close,’ she protested. ‘It won’t come out.’ ‘Never mind,’ I urged. ‘Try. Hurry. Before it flies away.’ Then she moved fast. She unzipped her camera’s soft leather case, stepped back, focused, and clicked.
I moved my hand slowly towards my chest to examine the creature as carefully as possible without disturbing it. Dazzling patterned wings, black-speckled, leaf-veined. Scales’ iridescent blue tipped with filigree bandings of red and green. Firm-etched, sunlight-catching colours, changing at the slightest tremor. Then, a childhood association, from way back in my head. Ladybird, Ladybird, Fly away home . . . And I blew softly on the insect. But immediately, more thoughts crowded out this fantasy, coming so thick and fast they interrupted and cancelled one another, before any had time to settle. Not so much a short-circuiting of connections as an overloading of available lines.
One was laughter. No common or garden ladybird, fool, but a butterfly. A miraculous butterfly. Of a kind I’ve never seen before. And, more serious: The butterfly symbolises the soul. Whose? And more serious still: The men and boys massacred here by the Nazis had their homes burned too. Parents lost children. Children lost parents. And, with a kind of detached, musing curiosity, in an acute awareness of pain that, oddly, had no pain in it, but an unusual, calm, alert acceptance, almost an aloofness, it was so impersonal: Is this some message from the souls of these dead? A request? A blessing? A command? A duty and an honour being conferred? And, more mundanely, What kind of butterfly? Male or female? Can it be fully grown, and still so small? And butterfly words, appearing out of memory’s nowhere, wafted around my head: chrysalis, shard, larva, pupa, lepidoptera, fritillary, imago. And then a sense of space, transparency, combined with a quiet, rooted, conscious joy.
I blew on the small creature again, and waved my hand gently up and down. This time it responded, flittered away, performed a few, quick, seemingly random aerial twirls just in front of my face – and then resettled, as if quite purposefully, on the same finger it had just relinquished. Another fantasy, mingled with the others, still hovering: my mind flashed back to England, last winter, to my friend David, who had killed himself one icy February evening outside his snow-surrounded bungalow in the Cambridgeshire fens, by feeding the exhaust fumes from his stationary car back through its heating system, while he sat asphyxiating, strapped in the driver’s seat, radio blaring, a half bottle of scotch on his lap and an open packet of Marlborough on the passenger seat beside him. I’d been his last close friend to see him alive, that morning, in London. Can this be HIS soul, coming back here? In this place where death and life meet? To greet me on neutral ground? To connect with me again? To explain? To atone, perhaps, for that devouring need he’d had, for perfection?
‘Wind the spool on,’ I said to Lara. ‘Quick, And give me the camera.’ I stretched my left arm straight in front of me, and with my other hand clumsily focused the lens. (I’m left-handed.) My butterfly seemed just as unconcerned as before, almost as if it was posing – wanting, waiting to have its portrait taken. Perhaps it trusts me, I thought, almost flattered by its attentiveness. Or maybe it just likes my smell. I clicked. It rested another few seconds on my finger, then took off, hovered, flittered away. I felt a momentary panic, as at an irretrievable loss. The keeper re-opened her glass doors and we trooped into the museum.
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