Three Horses in a Field at Dusk

1

This was in Łódź, Poland, just off the main boulevard. You and I were standing before one of those empty, disintegrating factories next to a wire fence, a building with two towering, I thought teetering, chimneys, bricks streaked with ash. Dusk had already smothered the day. A metallic sky, ferrous. In the cold distance: bells. Birds, you remember, colored exactly like the sky flew up as if startled from one of the plane trees that lined the street and disappeared instantly. You pulled my arm and we stopped in front of a man, some kind of a magician, in a little square on the corner. He wore a long black coat and a top hat that seemed immovable. He spoke without speaking. There was no one else around, if I recall. The man sat behind a small table covered with a blue cloth. He moved his head and you pulled me closer to him. On the table: three identical cups, upside-down. You looked at me and smiled. The man lifted the three cups one at a time. Beneath the middle cup was a small porcelain figurine of a horse, chestnut in color, rearing, on a little pedestal. (I told you later that the position symbolized death.) The other two cups were empty. The man replaced the cups and began to slide them around on the table in a theatrical manner. He had very long fingers. I looked at him and saw black triangles under his cheekbones. He moved the cups slowly. It was very easy to follow the cup that contained the horse. We assumed he must have tricked us already. Then he stopped and looked at you. (I was invisible to the man.) You pointed and correctly guessed the cup with the horse. He repeated the “trick,” and every time you guessed correctly, and every time, after he revealed the horse, he would reach over to the edge of the table and lift one of those wooden hand-clappers, the kind made for children, and wave it in the air to imitate applause. It was all very strange. Anyway, I still think about this—the street, the man, the little horse, the birds and the bells and the falling night—and I’m not yet free of the sadness of it all.

2

It is dusk already when the commission arrives, with the sound of shouting. Inside the dormitory the men rise from where they had been lying under blankets, walk naked to a small anteroom. The room is warm. The feeling of skin on skin, a pleasant sensation. The wooden walls strain audibly from the pressure of the naked men. A horse screams somewhere in the distance, beyond the wire fences perhaps, a horse that seems to be in some distress. Finally a door to the outside world opens, and not far away, just steps across a frozen field engraved with old snow, beneath an iron sky, stand three men. The man in the middle, exactly centered, wears a black greatcoat and a black military cap. It goes like this: A command is given, and one naked man (wearing only his wooden shoes) leaves the dormitory and approaches with his card. The man in the greatcoat carefully watches the way the naked man sticks out his chest and holds his head high and flexes what is left of his musculature, and then, after the naked man hands over his card, the man in the greatcoat watches the naked man return to the dormitory and enter through a second door. Before the next naked man is called, the man in the greatcoat hands the card to either the man on his right or the man on his left. Sometimes the man in the greatcoat claps, and the two other men, as if connected by invisible strings, immediately join in. The sound of the applause echoes like the wings of startled birds, then disappears quickly into the spreading, now dissipating, smoke from the two brick chimneys to the northeast. It is not clear if the applause is of any significance whatsoever. What one watching this curious procession of naked men might notice is the fact that the man in the greatcoat, as if by some mathematical need, has determined to always hand every third card to the man on his left. The pattern is unchanging, like a waltz: right, right, left, right, right, left . . . Over the course of only three or four minutes, the man in the greatcoat will hand the cards of one-third of the naked men to the man on his left. And these are the men, these are the men exactly, who the next day, or perhaps the day after that, will die.

3

A stage. A podium. A man.

“I had passed the field with the three horses, had even driven awhile longer, but something gnawed at me, something I thought I might capture in time, so I turned around and parked by the side of the road next to a wire fence. Three horses: a chestnut, a gray, and a small piebald (chestnut and white). I suddenly had the desire to find, if I could, three positions, three perspectives, in which the three horses would be exactly equidistant, in all three permutations, all three orders, you see. Was this possible? I needed to find out.”

The first photo appears on a white screen at the center of the stage.

“Here we see the view from the road. The chestnut horse to the left, the gray in the middle, the small piebald to the right. The hills beyond were pale-yellow in the dusk, dotted with oaks and their long shadows (the sun was setting nearly behind me). There were flashes of silent summer lightning edging the horizon, although I had unfortunately failed to capture it. Clouds the color of bones. A great silence. You may think me mad, of course, but, after taking several shots, I left the road, my camera in hand, easily made my way under the wire fence (a fence, I suppose, more for horses than for people), and walked across the field, turning to look at the horses every several steps. At a certain point I disturbed, and in turn was disturbed by, a flock of black crows, which swooped up flapping from the field like bits of ash in a sudden wind and disappeared into the crowns of a row of plane trees to the northeast. Finally, I stopped.”

A second photo appears (replacing the first).

“Everything was darker, as you can see. From left to right: the chestnut, the small piebald (perfectly centered), the gray. All was still very quiet; a swarming, resonant kind of silence. The sun had set, and the sky had turned the grass around the horses red. I took several shots, stood for only a minute or two longer, then continued walking; by now there was no turning back. I passed under another wire fence, stepped over tall grass and the skeletons of fallen cypress trees and old, rusted, indescribable farm equipment. There was a nearly hidden irrigation canal that I had to leap over, if you can imagine it. I kept expecting someone to appear with a shotgun for waterfowl, to chase me off, or worse. Again, I would periodically check the horses as I somewhat laboriously made my way in a wide semicircle through the field.”

A third photo appears.

“Here we see the small piebald to the left, the gray in the center, the chestnut to the right. (So yes, I was pleased to discover, the three permutations were possible.) You will note the strange fact that the chestnut has followed my movements; in each photo her head is always turned toward me, as if she were wary of my presence, as if fearing some violence or invasion. (I was invisible to the others.) You can see the road now. Electrical wires. A ferrous sky. I had failed to notice the building across the road, so focused was I on the three horses. A brick building with a sloping roof, something like an old factory, with irregular windows boarded up and painted the color of the bricks, and two huge towering chimneys.”

All three photos now appear in a triptych.

“I have been asked: What does it all mean? The three horses in a field at dusk, their apparent equidistance, the hills, the old factory, the chimneys. What is the significance of all this? I have been asked: Why?”

The man laughs. The audience laughs.

“Why? Well, I suppose that is the essential question. That is the eternal question.”

The screen goes black. Applause.