An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of violent death
• Description of corpses
• Description of drug use
• Description of ‘cold turkey’ cessation of drug use
• Descriptions of death in the context of war. 
• Mentions of fascism 
• Descriptions of healed injuries caused by torture
• Portrayal of morphine-induced hallucinations
• Portrayal of emotional distress, including crying

Transcript

[WHOOSH]

Every night Benoit dreams of Billy. The dreams always start the same; warm; close; happy. Then at once they are outside and Billy is falling. Benoit wakes as he hits the ground, and for a moment, every time, all he can see is red. 

His room in Amsterdam is not red. The walls are pale blue, cracked in places. The curtains are beige and only block out half the light. It’s a damp, gloomy Autumn outside. Benoit’s head aches. In the mornings, Greta, who owns the boarding house, leaves breakfast outside his door. He only unlocks it for a moment to retrieve the food, then retreats inside. He eats when he can, but this has not been often. All he has done for a week now, it feels like, is sweat, and vomit, and dream of Billy dying again and again. 

It’s Benoit’s fault Billy is dead; he was under the bridge because Benoit had asked him to be. He should have been at home in bed, safe and far away from Benoit, but he wasn’t. He was waiting under the bridge where Benoit had told him to be, because he was good and kind and sweet and all the other things Benoit did not deserve him to be. And now he was dead. 

He had not seen who had pushed him. Only a shape moving through the dark as he’d walked down the other side of the Seine. He’d looked across and seen Billy standing there waiting, like he said he would be. And then shape in the dark. Called Billy’s name, desperate for him to run. But it was too late. 

Again and again, Billy fell to the ground. In the glow of the streetlamp, the pool of blood around his head when Benoit finally got to him was a black mirror on the ground. Benoit saw his own horrified face staring up at him. He did not turn Billy over. He could not bear to touch him. 

And now Amsterdam, a closed door. Breakfast in the mornings, dinner in the evenings. Nibbling the edge of toast and sandwiches, setting plates full of eggs and vegetables back outside the door for Greta to collect. No drink, no drugs. Just sweat, and vomit, and endless, endless dreams. 

[WHOOSH] 

Benoit stands outside a house that has been made into a strange museum. It still looks like a home, unremarkable next to those around it, but remarkable all the same. A place were a family was hidden through the war until they couldn’t be hidden anymore. 

Benoit pays the entry free to the girl at the front desk. The house is busy, but not packed. Benoit climbs the stairs to the room the Frank family had lived in for months in silence, its entrance obscured by shelves. He has not read the girl, Anne’s, book but there are extracts of it on the walls. A strange place for a girl to begin to grow into a woman, hidden in the dark, rarely able to speak, always in such proximity to so many others. 

Benoit walks the rooms of the museum slowly, reading every word, even those printed in languages he did not understand. He also does not understand why it moves him the way it does, to see these memories preserved, marked, maintained. An attempt, he thinks, to give the young Anne Frank back some small portion of the life which was stolen from her. 

The girl on the front desk hands Benoit a tissue. Her name is Leida, she says, and Benoit should not be ashamed for crying. It is a powerful place, she says, and people worked hard to preserve it. Her own mother helped Anne’s father, Otto, raise funds to buy the house and turn it into a museum it’s become. 

Leida’s brother was killed in the war. He was only young, younger even than Anne. He did not know his mother was half-Jewish, that she had spent the war ferrying information from a Nazi officer who lived just up the road from them. 

‘Is it far from here?’ Benoit asks. 

‘The place where my brother died? No, not too far. Two hours by car.’ 

‘Will you take me?’ 

Leida seems surprised by this request, but she agrees. 

[WHOOSH] 

Leida does not take Benoit to her old home first. She begins his tour of this nowhere place of trees and sweeping fields with the house up the street, where the man who killed her brother lived. The front door stands ajar, as though someone has left it like that, inviting them in. 

‘It’s the land that made this place so valuable. Most of it has been sold off, now, but nobody wants the house,’ Leida explains. 

Inside, the walls are damp. Black mould grows through the wallpaper. What furniture remains is warped and stained by water, legs swollen and splintering, old lacquer almost completely gone. 

‘They found a lot of art, here, after the place was cleared out,’ says Leida. ‘Most of it was returned to the museums it had been stolen from, but some of it was taken from private collections. Some of the families those collections belonged to had been almost entirely wiped out.’ 

‘So where did they end up if they had no homes to go to?’ 

‘I don’t know, really. Some were sent to warehouses or museums, others were sold.’

They step back outside. The green fields are a relief. They walk through waist high grass. Cows watch from the other side of the fence, interested enough to raise their heads, but not to stop chewing. 

They reach a patch of trees, clustered around a junction in the fence work. There, in the shady ground, a small, round stone. ‘There is my brother,’ says Leida. 

‘A beautiful place to rest,’ says Benoit. 

‘He was trying to save me,’ says Leida. ‘Allied forces had pressed into the region and our mother had told us to hide in the cellar. We were in there for a week before we ran out of supplies. Hans was trying to reach the barn so he could milk the cows. He was not even shot on purpose. Caught in the crossfire between American soldiers and the Nazi officer who lived in the house I just showed you. Hans was shot by accident, trying to save me.’ 

Leida does not cry as she speaks. Benoit finds himself wishing she would. He doesn’t know why. Perhaps because then he would have permission to cry, too. To cry for this boy he did not know, for all the people he never met, who died for stupid, pointless reasons. He grew up in Italy, where soldiers were not talked about as heroes, but when he went places with his mother he heard the stories of the glorious dead. 

There is no glory as Benoit stands over Hans’ grave, just as there had been no glory in the Anne Frank house he’d visited the week before. The only respite, the only thing even close to glory is in the great lengths those left behind had taken to preserve some part of what was lost, to return some life to those from whom it had been stolen, be it in the form of a whole museum, or here, as a small, simple grave beneath a tree. 

Benoit sits on the grass. He gathers twigs from the dirt. He does not know what is doing until he’s finished and sets a small maquette of a boy, made only of dirt and twigs and loose threads pulled from his jacket, upon the’ grave. Leida touches his shoulder. Quietly, she says ‘thank you.’ 

[WHOOSH] 

Benoit’s next project, and his entire life, comes back to him in scraps. Literal scraps. Bits of wood and cloth and barbed wire. He wanders town to town, asks people about their memories of the war. They tell him about planes and bombs and gunfire. Inevitably, they tell him about the dead. 

Sometimes they take him to their graves, others, to the places they were killed. Benoit asks what he can. What did they like; where did they go; how did you know them. The stories are as varied as those telling them. Out of those stories, and the scraps Benoit gathers as they are told, he sculpts. 

In his mind, he calls the sculptures shadows, but he does not say this aloud. They’re little more than outlines, and they are not meant to last. He leaves them at gravesites and death places in the woods; in gardens; down alleyways. They are unmarked and unannounced to anyone except the person who told the story that made the shadow. Sometimes they sit and watch him build it, other times they leave. Sometimes Benoit is done, he stands with them, often in silence. Benoit does not explain what it is or why he made it because he does not know. Almost every time, nobody asks, anyway. If they speak at all, it’s only to thank him, quietly. 

This is enough.

[WHOOSH] 

And then Benoit moves on. 

Mostly, Benoit stays away from drink and opiates, but not always. Sometimes the stories are too heavy for him to hold without them. Whenever he slips up, he finds some place to stay, far away from everything else. He locks himself away with two days worth of bread and water, emerges only when he thinks he can bear the world without muffling again. 

Then he sets off, looking for the next story. The next person who is gone, whose shadow he can craft from little pieces of what they’ve left behind. 

Every shadow has a bit of Billy. He will never build him his own. 

It goes on like this for months, years, until he meets a man in Poland. 

Nikki has been drifting too. It is the first time since Billy died that Benoit has wanted to kiss anyone, and to his relief, Nikki lets him. 

They cannot speak very much to one another; Nikki speaks only Russian and a few scraps of Hungarian and a handful of English. It’s enough for them to understand that when they drift along next, they would like to drift together. 

Over months, Benoit comes to understand that Nikki is a refugee. Slipped out from beneath the Iron Curtain. He knows the scars on Nikki’s back are the ghosts of torture, and the same of the mottled skin on the soles of his feet. If they walk too long, Nikki’s feet ache and he soaks them in bowls of salt and warm water. Benoit dries them for him, smoothing the healed burns, delicately tracing the places where his toes have healed together as one. 

When Benoit builds his sculptures, Nikki sits and watches. He helps find the scraps Benoit needs to build them. When Benoit finishes, he and Nikki sit with them a while, wondering about the person whose shadow Benoit has reconstructed, what was missing from the stories Benoit was told about them. 

They leave, not knowing how long the sculptures will remain, only that it will not be forever. 

[WHOOSH]

Benoit crosses the fields, stands at the crooked threshold of the old house Leida had showed him years before. He bought it for almost pennies, as a patch of land with a ruin. The house is not a ruin, though, despite the damage to its guts. There are liveable rooms in the upper floors, ironically the ones which once would have housed the servants. 

Leida comes to visit. ‘What will you do with the place?’ 

‘Make things and try to live,’ says Benoit. 

Nikki watches from the stairs, whittling a small knob of wood with his knife. When it’s done it will be an owl. Owls are the only thing Nikki ever whittles. He sets them on the exposed beams in their blanket-lined bedroom. Rows and rows of wide wooden eyes peer down at them. Benoit tells Nikki a group of owls is called a parliament. Nikki says he hopes the government he’s carved will be better than the ones he has lived under. 

Leida knows some Russian, and she chats with Nikki as they eat soup in the garden. It’s colder out there than inside, but there is no smell of damp, so it’s much more pleasant. 

‘The people in town are upset you’ve bought the house,’ Leida tells Benoit. 

‘It belonged to Nazi officer for less than a decade; before that it was just another country house. If we leave everything they tried to colonise to rot, we’ll loose half of Europe.’ 

Leida smiles. ‘He was my father, you know, the officer who lived here. Get close to him, that was what she had to do. My mother always says she did her job too well.’

Benoit is quiet for a while. He does not need to ask about the strange conflict this must raise in Leida, it’s right there, plain on her face. Her conception was a betrayal, one met and underscored by her older brother’s murder. 

‘Hans was only my half-brother. His father was a man in town,’ Leida explains. 

‘I don’t know who my father was,’ says Benoit. ‘But my mother said he was dead, so I suppose it’s all the same to me.’ 

‘Ah,’ says Leida. 

Nikki asks what they’re saying. They switch to English and Leida elaborates in Russian on the parts he does not grasp. Nikki tells them he hardly knows his father, knows very little about him. He worked for the state; police, he says, but he does not mean it literally. Benoit has learned that in Russia anyone with close ties to the state and a lot of amassed power is called ‘police’. 

‘What about your mother,’ asks Leida. In bits and pieces she feeds back to Benoit Nikki’s response. In prison, he says. Before that, she liked to sing. She was very pretty last time he saw her. He does not know if she’s alive. 

‘Between us we have approximately two living parents, then,’ Benoit concludes. Leida’s mother,  for sure, and maybe both Nikki’s parents, but we can’t be certain so they only count as half. 

Nikki finds this funny, but Leida does not. Benoit is not sure if he meant it to be a joke. 

When they finish eating, Benoit takes Leida to the barn. It’s full of crates; each one contains a painting. All of them, his mother’s work. Dozens and dozens of forgeries of the masters. He’d known she was good, but not that she was so prolific. 

‘Will you display them in the house, when you’ve restored it?’ Leida asks.

‘No. I think I will build a shadow out of them.’ 

[WHOOSH]

Years pass. They travel. Benoit makes shadows of people who are gone. They visit places where the older ones once stood, see what is left of them. Some are completely gone; others stand in pieces; but some have been preserved. In one town in the French countryside, they find the shadow of a man has been draped in a scarf as though he might otherwise have caught a winter chill. 

Benoit keeps looking for his mother’s paintings, but he’s finding less and less. In the barn behind the house, her shadow grows. Shapeless and unconstructed, it’s too big for him to see its edges. 

[WHOOSH]

Leida comes to visit, brings her children and her husband. Benoit and Nikki were up the night before, building bunkbeds in one of the few downstairs rooms they have completed. Leida and her husband take the master suite. Benoit and Nikki finished restoring it last summer, but have stayed up in the attic, with its carpet lined walls, blankets nailed to the ceilings. A parliament of a thousand owls watches them sleep every night when they are home. 

They take Leida’s children to the river nearby to play, leave their parents at home. Benoit built a shadow just upstream years before. There’s almost nothing left of him now, just a few bent wires clinging to scraps of wood. 

Nikki plays with the children, barks at them in Russian they don’t understand, grins and makes them giggle. When he’s done, he sits beside Benoit on the bank. His skin is icy cold. It shimmers in the sunlight. Benoit thinks of Billy and the pool of blood around his head, does not tell Nikki when he asks what’s on his mind. Instead, Benoit says, ‘my love, we’re getting old.’ 

Nikki stretches out on the grass. ‘What a privilege,’ he says. 

‘Now where did you learn a word like that?’ Benoit asks him. 

‘Leida teached it to me; she says it’s what you are.’ 

Benoit laughs and stretches out on the grass beside Nikki. They look at the sky, a few wisps of cloud interrupting the blue. He wonders if Nikki is right. It certainly was, once. Apartments in Milan and Valencia, hotels in Paris, Venice, Barcelona. Private school in Switzerland. Meals in fancy restaurants. A mother who doted on him. All the art supplies he could ask for, and a great many more than he did not. 

Even his breakdown had been a luxury one. Crashing out in Paris, shooting up drugs whose value was probably more than most people would earn in their lives. 

His life is a very different kind of privileged now. He takes Nikki’s hand, looks up at the sky.

[WHOOSH]

Benoit hisses as he braces his hand against the wooden frame of his latest piece. A splinter, buried in his skin. He picks it out with this teeth, fastens the last screw in place, rubs his aching shoulder. His mother’s shadow looms below him. Suddenly, the ladder feels very, very high. 

‘Benoit!’ shouts Nikki. ‘I told you not to go up the ladders when I am not at home.’ 

‘I just wanted to be done,’ says Benoit.

Nikki nods, holds the ladder as Benoit slowly makes his way down. They stand there together looking up at it. At her. 

‘Is your mother, yes?’ says Nikki. 

‘Yeah.’ 

‘She is very impressive.’ 

‘I suppose.’ 

Thirty paintings, fastened onto a vast wooden structure. In its centre, empty space. All the nothing Benoit will never fill. A void that he was born from.

[WHOOSH] 

The sun falls over the window. Benoit stirs. 

Downstairs, Nikki is making tea. Benoit listens to him singing, picks a few words out of the Russian. He has been sick for weeks. The doctors gave him morphine for the pain. The irony of it, so many years spent trying to get off opiates, now he’s being prescribed them. A lot of them. 

He phases out of dreams and days. Sips tea with Nikki, admires the crotchet blanket brought to him by Leida’s granddaughter, messy and full of holes. He sleeps on Nikki’s chest, feels his voice reverberating through his skull. He dreams of Billy. He dreams of his mother. He dreams of Perry. All shadows moving across the sky. A sky full of clouds. He’s watching, watching. Watching his mother paint. Brush behind each ear, one held in her teeth. 

‘Shh,’ Nikki tells him. ‘It’s okay. I’m still here.’ 

Benoit tries to cling to him but he cannot move his hands. Nikki clings for him. Where is he? White lights, nearby beeping. There’s something on his face. 

‘It’s okay. You are okay,’ says Nikki. 

Tell me about your mother, Benoit thinks. We didn’t talk about her enough. Tell me about the place you came from. There are so many things I don’t know. Tell me everything tell me everything. 

Nikki holds Benoit’s hand, speaks low and fast and quiet. The words are a river and Benoit is swept along by the current. It is a beautiful day and the air is fresh and there are children playing nearby. There is clay on Benoit’s hands as he forms his mother’s face. Nikki tells him she is beautiful. 

[WHOOSH] 

[THE APPRENTICE SOBS]

SIR

Do they matter?

APPRENTICE

Sir?!

SIR

Do they?

APPRENTICE

Yeah. Yes they do. They matter. They fucking matter. 

SIR

Did you ruin them? 

APPRENTICE

I don’t know. I don’t know. 

SIR

Do you really think you mattered so much to them, in the end?

APPRENTICE

Why are you asking me this?! Where were you? I woke up and you weren’t there. Where were you. 

SIR

I lost you. I’m so sorry. 

APPRENTICE

Don’t lose me again. 

SIR

I promise I will try to do my best. 

[THE APPRENTICE CRIES] 

SIR

You knew him, didn’t you. You knew Benoit. 

APPRENTICE

I knew his mother better. 

SIR

Perhaps, perhaps not. Do you think that she knew you?

APPRENTICE

I don’t know. 

SIR

Who are you, Apprentice? 

APPRENTICE

I don’t know. I was Edwin Peterson first, but that wasn’t supposed to be my name. My mother wanted to name me for her brother, Erwin. Then I was Edward Pocket. Then Theodore du Perier. Then Perry and Basil and god knows who else. 

I’m a hollow thing, like Benoit’s statue of his mother. Nothing inside me but empty space. 

SIR

No, Apprentice. Do you still not understand? 

APPRENTICE

Well nor do you! You forgot! 

SIR

Yes. And then I lost you, and I heard you reading anyway. Your voice came from everywhere and everything and the whole place trembled with it. We are not separate from this place. We are not just made of the same things; we are the same thing. You and me and every remnant here. 

APPRENTICE

So why are we different?

SIR

I don’t know. I’m not sure that we are. I think it might only look that way from where we are standing. We are just building shadows, as Benoit did. Shadows of everyone whose lives were influenced by yours, even in the smallest ways, even removed by degrees. You ask why you see the pieces of the remnants that you do; I think this may be the answer. It’s because of who you are.

[THE APPRENTICE SOBS HARDER] 

APPRENTICE

I don’t want to see them at all anymore. I want it all to stop. I get it, I hurt people, now let me go.

SIR

Ah, you think it’s still a punishment. I do not think it is that. I think these are mirrors. They show you just as much of yourself as anything else. Aren’t all stories mirrors in this way, in the end? Reflecting ourselves back to us? I think you have been someone different to everyone who has ever known you.

APPRENTICE

I don’t want to know any of it anymore. I can feel it all up there in my head, too much stuff for me to think of. It hurts so much to try.

SIR

But you have not fallen apart. 

APPRENTICE

No. I haven’t. 

SIR

This feels important. I thinks it means I have been wrong about some things. I think it means I cannot let you go. Not even if I wanted to. 

APPRENTICE

But please. 

SIR

It is not my choice to make. I think you have to be the one that does it.

APPRENTICE

I tried that and the whole place collapsed and you forgot everything! Now you can’t answer any of my stupid questions and you don’t just talk in riddles you talk in bloody mazes and we’re both completely, and utterly lost. 

SIR

No. Not lost. We know exactly where we are. We are where we started, and where we will end. 

APPRENTICE 

The First and Last Place. 

SIR

Yes. 

APPRENTICE

Does this mean that you think there’s a way out, now? 

SIR

I think so. 

APPRENTICE

So how do we get there? 

SIR

I think you have to let things go, Apprentice. 

APPRENTICE

And how do I do that?

SIR

Shelve, or discard?

[END]