The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach Page A

again.
    ‘Please tell me what happened,’ said Eschburg.
    ‘It’s a long story. You don’t want to know.’
    ‘Of course I want to know,’ he said.
    She looked at him for a long time. ‘Very well,’ she continued. ‘Those men were not pleasant characters, understand? They pick up girls in the villages of Ukraine and promise them a good life. Then they train the girls as prostitutes – “breaking them in”, it’s called. The girls are made available to punters, often ten or twenty men at a time, mass rapes in empty factory buildings. The police always arrive too late, and by the time they do turn up the girls and their pimps are in the next town. That scene is a world to itself; the punters pay good money, and the pimps are everywhere, in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany. They’re quick, those men, and frontiers mean nothing to them at all.’
    Senja Finks paused and grimaced. Her shirt was turning dark over her stomach area; her injury had opened up. Her breathing was shallow.
    ‘When a girl is worn out,’ said Senja Finks, ‘they cut off her hands and her head and throw her away with the garbage. Or they sell her first to a punter who whips her to death. The men record it on video and sell that later.’
    ‘That sort of thing is only for the movies,’ said Eschburg.
    ‘No,’ she said, ‘you won’t find it in any movie.’
    They both fell silent. Eschburg closed his eyes. His head was hurting.
    ‘Let me ask you now,’ said Senja Finks, ‘what is a girl like that to do if she’s managed to get away? If she’s stolen a great deal of money from the men, if she’s learned to survive and to kill?’
    She stood up and took the two steps over to Eschburg’s bed. She smelled of cigarettes and blood. When she leaned forward he saw that her eyes were pale green. Behind the glasses, her pupils were vertical slits.
    ‘What is guilt?’ she asked. Her voice sounded feverish.
    At close quarters, thought Eschburg, death no longer seems threatening.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

24
    Because Eschburg’s photographs aroused more press interest in Italy than anywhere else, the gallery wanted to show his new installation in Rome first. The Japanese who had bought
The Maja’s Men
made those two pictures available for the exhibition. The Polaroid plates, the screens, cables and computer were packed into wooden crates in Eschburg’s Linienstrasse studio and collected by a haulage firm.
    A week later Eschburg flew to Rome. He boarded an airport bus on the runway. Hundreds of starlings were circling the air traffic control tower. Later, his taxi driver told him that Rome was using hawks to try driving those birds out of the city, but the tactic wasn’t working.
     
    The gallery had hired the first-floor rooms of a restored seventeenth-century palazzo.
Over the next few days, Eschburg made preparations for the exhibition. He hung eighteen photographs along each of the longer walls of the main hall. The Plexiglas plates were lit from behind, showing the women’s bodies in a soft, sepia tone. There was a video screen at the end of the hall. The installation was programmed so that a beamer projected one of the Polaroids on to the screen first. A quarter of a second later, the computer laid a second Polaroid over it, making a new picture out of the two of them. Then the next photo was placed on top of that picture, and so on at intervals of a quarter of a second, until the sum of them all was yet another picture. The outcome was that the women photographed by Eschburg merged to form a new woman. Her face and figure were the average of all the models, their central point. All irregularities, folds and blemishes of the skin disappeared. The artificial woman looked younger than the photographic models, her face and body were perfectly symmetrical. And she was indeed beautiful.
    Then the Plexiglas plates on the walls had their background lighting switched on, one by one, while the skin of the artificial woman