In His Own Image by Jérôme Ferrari

Author:Jérôme Ferrari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Deliver them from the lion’s mouth

That hell swallow them not up

That they fall not into darkness.

At the end of the war, Rista M. settles in Belgrade. His country has changed its name, as it will do again on numerous occasions. It is now Peter I, King of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, by the grace of God and the will of his people, who delivers a passport printed in French and Serbo-Croatian to M., Rista, thirty-four years of age, journalist, average height, long face, light brown hair, blue eyes, regular nose, regular mouth and mustache, who in 1929 will become the subject of Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia. He works for the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before founding his own agency. He takes pictures of the royal family, of the princesses playing with their dolls, of the heir to the throne, of King Alexander riding on horseback into the dappled light of forest undergrowth. He experiments with color, with the movement of life in the parks and streets of Belgrade.

In 1930, he is present at the inauguration of a monument on whose pedestal these words are carved: Aimons la France comme elle nous a aimés.3

In 1934, now that he knows that hiatuses never really end, he covers Hermann Göring’s visit to Belgrade. He does, however, continue to take impeccably composed pictures of daily life and domestic bliss. Does he see something there besides a long procession of shadows and ghosts? In any case, he does not seem to be interested in anything else. He does not accompany Alexander to France. He does not hear the shots, the horses whinnying, the screams of the crowd when panicked policemen begin emptying their weapons. There are many photographers watching the king—whose portrait Rista M. has taken so often—as the blood oozes from his body, there, inside the official car, now stopped on the Canebière, but Rista M. is not among them.

He hears that civil war has just broken out in Spain.

One year later, while Rista M. is following couples strolling along the banks of the river Sava, a petty NKVD bureaucrat at the Lubyanka, who no doubt has never looked on photography as an art, is recording through his camera lens a daily procession of all those who know they are destined to die or be deported to Kolyma. He then painstakingly files away all their portraits, on which he has written their names, patronymic, and surnames. Z., Aleksey Ivanovich; B., Anna Moiiseyevna; B., Evgenia Yuzefovna; V., Elizaveta Alekseyevna; M., Osip Emilyevich; V., Vladimir Nilovich; they are forty, sixteen, twenty, or seventy-two years of age, they are poets or illiterates, carpenters, workers, pensioners, Orthodox priests, translators. In their eyes, one can read anger, irony, terror, defiance, despondency, or astonishment, but the diversity of their individual reactions matters little because, in carrying out his fastidious administrative task, the NKVD employee has unwittingly made the presence of death tangible, death that has settled inside every one of them and against which they do not even think of struggling.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.