It was a moonless night

It was a Moonless Night

As she turned to draw the sack down over the bananas, she caught a glimpse of herself in the cracked mirror. The bodega was dusty and the mirror scratched and pitted by years of use. She stood very still in a landscape of dissociation. She could not be that woman in the glass. The hair, matted and nasty, reminded her of photographs of the working class poor by Diane Arbus. She drew closer, looking for Hannah Friedlander. Instead she found the reflection of a woman with tired eyes and clenched teeth. She had a cumulative feeling of glumness when she looked down at her hands, smeared with scummy residue from the ripening fruit.

“This is me; this is my unedited reality,” she said to herself.

Cleaning the black slime from the corners of her eyes, she stepped out of the coolness of the shed into the tropical heat. She was physically spent and that always took a toll on her emotions. The sun was gone, leaving the sky blushing flagrantly with color so intense that Hannah was moved to tears by the beauty.

“Wolf,” she said out loud, “You can’t take this away from me.”

Hannah’s clothes fell in a pile around her ankles. The water in the neglected pool was cool on her parched skin. She swam a length under water playing a game of visual roulette. The images came from inside her head, hazy and incomplete. She flipped over on her back catching her breath and floating lazily under the darkening sky.

“It is so easy to lose sight of the simple pleasures in life,” she thought.

It would be tempting but misleading to ascribe the peacefulness of that night to Hannah’s motionless swim. Her floating body was still but her mind was taking photographs in rapid succession. When she left Germany, she had been a rising star, transforming images of the banal into works of art. Her chief concern had been an investigation into the nature of light. There was a disconcerting tension between her unsentimental subject matter and the slightly romantic lighting that she manipulated in the darkroom.

She floated for a long time, traveling in her mind, and cooling her body. She hadn’t used her Leica since Wolf fled the country in horror and fear.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” she said into the silence. “It was your own damn fault.”

An artist too, Wolf came to view paint as a medium for releasing his pent-up emotions. He was an action painter. When he couldn’t paint, he drank. He thought a change of environment would help the situation so they left Munich for Costa Rica. Hannah adapted easily to the sensuously rich landscape but the contemplative stillness of the farm irritated Wolf and he sought out action, not within his paintings, but from the local bars.

Hannah, face up to the stars, floated and thought of those times so many years ago. She remembered listening for Wolf’s truck coming up the hill on the nights he was out drinking. The mountain roads were treacherous and she worried he would kill himself. She was furious with him for drinking and not working. It was hard to concentrate on her own photography when they were fighting so Hannah decided to return to Munich.

The week before her departure the phone rang. She flipped and dove to the bottom of the pool trying to get away from the ringing, a memory that frequently played in her head. This time the images were real without any blurring. They were as strong as that night 9 years ago when she frantically drove to find Wolf at the side of the road. It was a moonless night but she saw bodies that would forever torture her psyche. He hit them with the truck. Elements from that grotesque side show were with her now. The memory of mutilation and chaos rose to the surface of her mind just as she surfaced to breath.

“My God Wolf! What did you do?”

It was the act of driving him home that haunted her. She helped the murderer get away. He boarded the plane the next morning for Germany, barely sober and stinking of guilt. Hannah had cried but not for Wolf. She cried for the dead woman and her unborn child. She cried for the dead father and for herself.

Now she lay back on the surface of the water breathing deeply and looking at the stars. Solitude and silence had been her handmaidens and now she was whole. She knew it was time to make new images.

“Tomorrow I will find my Leica.”