1001 Nights Cast

A glass case filled with shoes to sell on a street corner in Belgrade.

A park of long grass and wild dogs and hedges and hiding spots in Belgrade, leading to the Museum of Art along the river front. The park seems deserted except for the dogs. I have sticky, unwashed hair from my overnighter train from Sofia to Belgrade. I have ten hours to spend in a city I have only heard of from the news and by accident the city has thrown itself in front of me and I am inside it now. Go to the Museum. It is logical.

The entrance corridor to the Museum leads to glass doors, stumped ajar. I see a cluster of young men gathered around the reception desk. They are leaning their heads into each other, their ankles rolling over, laughing (I think) conspiratorially, glancing towards me by the doorway.

One man draws a line across his neck. Closed.

It is obvious the building is closed. Their lazy stance. The apparent absence of all other people. But I stand there persistently, my mouth jammed shut. I am still holding stones in my pocket quite hard, the stones I collected to throw at the wild dogs in the park. I don’t want to return outside just yet. I can hear the dogs barking.

But I’ve come all the way, from the city. Eventually I speak with a tight throat.

One man softens, immediately springs forward to welcome me.

We can’t, he says in pristine English, allow you to enter the Museum as it is having refurbishments and most of the galleries are empty. But wait.

He seats me at a table in the foyer of the closed Museum. He trips back to the reception desk and sweeps a pile of magazines, a set of block printed books, monographs, exhibition notices and brings an armful over to me, laying them out in a fan.

Quiet.
Thank you, I say smiling at the books.
This is all to see.
Thank you.

A glass case filled with emptiness. The emptiness of books under the old square on Unter Den Linden, Berlin. I am so captured, my boots crack the icy blue stones and land on the glass window. My two feet apart, I look through the glass, down, down, down into the whiteness of empty shelves and bright halogen light. I’m a child hearing the crackling roar of books, definitely I can hear novels being read, the murmur of encyclopaedias, I imagine the burning sea in the most luminous Kirchner, the teenagers plunging into the sea, I see on either side of the glass case, an oily slick of a George Grosz city, pools of molten colour flowing between stones on the winter square. My tourism has taken on the force of my childhood imagining. Imagining my first war. A city at war. A krystalnacht. A night of broken glass.

A glass case to break in case of fire. Doors to break in case of emergency. On the outskirts of Lisbon, I’m staring at the perverse emergency graphics on a bus. We are bounce bouncing along towards the seaside. Everyone is sweating, along with my mother and everyone is travelling to the coast for the European summer. Instructions for breaking glass show a warning for fleeing a moving vehicle. It shows a stick figure in an a-frame dress spread-eagled at the side of an icon of a bus. This bus is given emphasis by magnetic lines radiating from it which to me means a rumble, a dangerous bus. As we swing from side to side, through dense town housing, apartments, I am thinking about the animal properties of machines and suddenly a cement replica of Rio’s Christ looms up in the front window of the bus, embedded between low rise flats and the sandy beginnings of the coast.

This glass case contains Jesus, our Mr. of Monserrate, Our Señor of Bogota. Through the glass window, my stubby hands against the edge of the case, Jesus is replete in his feminine pose, he’s fallen from the cross, twisting back like a nubile mermaid, cords of blood streaming from his wrists, temple and feet. The Señor of Monserrate looks younger than his 33 years and has either horse or woman’s hair, slightly dusty and the grotesque sheen of some Catholic icons. And his secret companion, in this extraordinary temple, overlooking from his glass case the broad sweep of Bogota’s favelas, Le Corbusier apartments, meticulous town planning of carreras, calles and avenidas, overseeing all, along with our pubescent Señor is the Black Virgin, austere with her Black Baby Jesus, El Niño Divino, The Divine Black Baby hosting two fingers, held up to the chaos of the city.

My final glass case, in a litany of glass cases and cities. This was the glass case I ran to and was kept enthralled by on my childhood visits to the Tasmanian Museum.

This glass case contained a life-sized diorama. A statue of a mother, Trugannini with glass eyes and a moulded baby at her breast held in wallaby skin, with cast tribal markings rising from the arm, with human hair plaited in plastic mud, with a fake fire glowing. Trugannini was also holding out a firestick. This was a glass case of many questions. As a child I did not imagine the war as such. I had a genuine terror that the fire would be extinguished or that the figures would begin to speak or break the glass and step out. The beach scene went on forever in extended perspective, the flat sandy points that characterise East Coast Tasmania. This case contained a gruesome utopia—gruesome because the diorama was static and silent and there was so little information on the only human scale figure in the Museum. This case and exhibit has since been removed.