Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavic Page B

exercise.
    When Auerbach came back with his camera bags, Brookes was wetting his handkerchief under the tap. He wiped the top of his head and watched Auerbach setting up the tripod, telescoping rods and tightening thumb nuts with the practice of a movie-screen assassin.
    Going closer, Brookes said, ‘That’s one nil to me. You’ve found a subject. Not just Mother and Child but Mother and Children. Twins.’
    â€˜I’m afraid it’s more interesting than that,’ Auerbach said coldly. ‘Or perhaps I should say complicated. There were triplets, but one of them died.’
    â€˜My God! That’s terrible, Saul. You should have said something.’
    â€˜They were burning a brazier in the room to keep warm this past winter. It’s a miracle the others didn’t suffocate too.’
    â€˜Is that them?’ Brookes asked. He was back in the doorway.
    â€˜It’s the only picture of all three.’
    â€˜May I?’
    It was unclear whose permission he was asking. He brought a snapshot out into the sunlight and studied it. ‘Also a boy? This one who died?’ Auerbach nodded. Brookes wrote in his notebook. Then he thrust the photograph at me, with an impatient grunt, as if to say, ‘Here, see what you’ve done. Happy now?’
    Veronica came out of the shack. She had taken off the doek and fluffed her hair into an astonished halo. She unpegged two woollen caps from the line – the pompomed caps you can see in Auerbach’s photograph – took the snapshot from me and went back inside.
    In a moment, Auerbach gathered the legs of the tripod into a sheaf and followed her.
    A car door slammed in the street. Brookes did not seem to notice. He found a kitchen chair in the corner of the yard, sat down with the notebook resting on his knee, and went on writing. His head looked like an egg extruded from the glistening shell of his jacket. Once again, I had the sense that he was directing us. Not that he was writing down what we were doing, but that we were moving or standing still, turning left or right according to his design. Dialogue was no longer possible: all we could do was act. Respond to stage directions.
    The photograph is one of Auerbach’s best. Of course, it has a special significance for me because I was there when he took it, but it is singled out by the experts too. You can look it up on the internet. They say it embodies those apparently contradictory qualities you read about on the dust jackets of his books. The tender way the woman holds the babies, presenting them in their innocent perfection: her head is turned aside, as if to make it clear that the children are the subject of the photograph, but also showing the lovely line of her cheek and the hoop in her ear. The twins are identical, you really cannot tell them apart. The mere handfuls of their heads in the soft caps, lolling against her breast, make you fear for the slender stems of their necks. Their eyes are open, their fingers are curled, and for all their delicacy, they look vital and ready to grow. Behind the mother, over her turned shoulder, is the snapshot of the triplets, propped on a wooden crossbeam against the iron wall. It is possible to miss that picture-within-a-picture entirely, but once seen it looms larger, or you wish it would. It makes you bend your head to the paper, trying to get closer, although you know this distance cannot be altered. The depth of field is fixed, once and for all. The third child, the dead one, irreplaceably absent in Auerbach’s photograph, persists in that smaller frame like an echo. But who can tell which child it is? The mother could say, perhaps, but she is absent too. In the circle of your eye, they all go on, living and dying, then and now.
    Yes, the embarrassment I felt on her behalf was entirely misplaced.
    Auerbach packed away his equipment and wrote their names in a notebook. He said he would bring her a copy of the photograph when it