Her Name Was Lola

36 Forget fulness Remembered

May 1997. Max’s pages are accumulating. He doesn’t know how Moe Levy’s story will end but he trusts that this will be revealed to him in the fullness of time. Moe has no complaints at the moment. He’s not a writer, he’s a painter, and he’s already done a portrait and many sketches of Lulu.

Max’s mind is kept busy riffling through its files as Max’s memories become Moe’s life. Today he’s recalling a visit to the V & A with Lola. This will be the Moe and Lulu activity in Chapter Nine. No title for it yet. Max’s mind gives him Lola and himself back in early February. Up the museum steps they go, through the revolving doors and into warmth and brightness, long spaces and echoes, years overlapped like fish scales. Bowls and goblets, wine of shadows. Women, men, gods and demons in stone, clay, bronze, ivory. Some with open eyes, some with closed. Fabrics and jewels embracing absent friends.

‘Let’s go to the Nehru Gallery,’ says Lola. They hear music as they approach. On a dais musicians with sitar, tabla, flute and harmonium are playing a classical raga, far-away warm and bright in the dark London winter. The music is not loud but it is very wide. Max and Lola are standing in front of a display case in which they see Shiva Nataraja dancing in bronze, his hair streaming symmetrically to right and left. Dancing in a bronze ring of fire, Shiva Nataraja with his four arms, his hands with drum, with flame, with ‘Fear not’, with pointing to his uplifted left foot. Under his right foot is a dwarf all blackish green with patina. It has a long body, short arms and legs. Under Shiva’s foot it is like an animal, something that goes on all fours. Its baby-face, is it reposeful? Max thinks it is. ‘That’s Apasmara Purusha,’ says Lola. ‘The dwarf demon called Forgetfulness.’

‘Among other things,’ says Max. ‘Is he someone you visit often?’

‘Our lives are made of memories,’ says Lola. ‘Everything up to the present moment, even the word now leaving my mouth, is a memory. I come here every now and then to make sure Apasmara’s still under Shiva’s foot.’

‘He’s a dangerous guy,’ says Max, ‘but even if he got loose he couldn’t make me forget you. Fear not.’

On the page Max is typing, that’s what Moe says to Lulu. ‘I’d just as soon you hadn’t put those words in my mouth,’ says Moe to Max. ‘They seem unlucky to me.’

‘Be brave,’ says Max. ‘We’ve all got to take our chances.’ He goes back to the beginning of the chapter and types in the title: FEAR NOT.