Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones

hijacked into fakery and exaggeration. It is a kind of release of self, a benign absorption. Ninotchka told the story of a Bolshevik apparatchik (Greta Garbo), who came to Paris in the thirties to supervise a delegation of three idiots, abroad with the taskof selling jewels confiscated from White Russians. It was farcical and lighthearted, with a witty script. Ninotchka began as an ideologue, but was converted through love to enjoy the decadence of the capitalist West, which she nevertheless insisted was crumbling into destruction. Paris was a city of lavish attractions and overflowing desire. At the nadir of her ideological betrayal, Ninotchka wore a ridiculous hat, which she had bought as a guilty secret. This, and learning to laugh, were the symbols of her defection.
    All through the movie Alice could hear Mr Sakamoto’s response. He snorted, chuckled, exclaimed, laughed outright. Around them other cinema patrons also laughed; in the extraterrestrial light of the black-and-white movie they looked glazed with pleasure, heightened and abstracted into filmy emotions. Alice could see the rumbling of their shoulders and their backward jerks of amusement. It was something childish; it was something profoundly of the body. Encouraged by this disinhibition, Alice began also to laugh, and found that the spirit of sadness she had carried all afternoon, the taint of the Métro, and the woman who had stained her, gradually dissipated. When they swept outside, into the cold street, she felt she had been cleansed by comedy.
    Mr Sakamoto was still cheerfully smiling. ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’ he exclaimed. ‘I love the scene where Ninotchka finally laughs.’
    Over drinks in a small bar Alice told Mr Sakamoto of the incident in the Métro, of the journey to the bookshop. She told him about the woman with the tattooed arm. Then she said that although she was studying modernity, she had bought a novel by Henry James.
    â€˜So what is the problem?’ he asked. ‘You are large enough to contain contradictions. We are all large enough – are we not? – to contain contradictions.’
    Mr Sakamoto had first seen Ninotchka when he was eight years old. He had understood nothing of the plot – although his sisters had tried to explain Bolshevism and the idiotic delegation – but was seduced by Greta Garbo’s luminous white face (‘as though she wore Japanese rice powder’) and the perceptibly sexual cadence of her laugh.
    â€˜It was a deep laugh,’ he said, ‘not a meretricious tinkle, such as passes for female laughter in movies today …’
    Afterwards he and his sisters had gone to a teahouse where they all practised imitating Greta Garbo’s laugh. Sachiko was the best. She threw back her head and let loose a thunderous sound. Accidentally she knocked over a cup of green tea, and then laughed again, with the others joining in. The owner of the teahouse thought they were misbehaved: three children laughing at nothing, talking in foreign languages and playing the fool.
    Mr Sakamoto smiled knowingly. ‘Not that I’ve seen many contemporary movies,’ he added.
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    That night, Alice lay in bed, insomniac, thinking of Garbo’s face, thinking of cinema. Mr Sakamoto was right; she would have to include it. Something in his story about the children practising a film-star laugh had impressed and moved her. She saw the three of them in a sepia light, hunched together in conspiratorial play, emboldened and united by movie-life mimicry. The screen carried fantasies writ large, but also bestowed games, gestural repertoires and collective stories; bestowed, moreover, a few images that stayed a lifetime, as if produced in intaglio. It was not mere absorption, but some kind of transaction. Not loss of self, but some fictive complication. Alice had heard the stuttering turn of the film strip, gearing up into expanded vision, had seen the cone of dusty light