Ruth Fainlight
April 2004

A Postcard from Tunisia


A street scene, almost a cross-road. Sunlight slants from right to left
down the alley where, head pensively bowed, like the young prince
with his enchanted friend in a fairy tale, a young man leads a sheep
(head half-turned enquiringly toward him) perhaps to be slaughtered—
which might be why he doesn’t seem to notice the gaze. The shadow
of something or someone further down the street, out of sight, stops just
at their feet. High on the wall behind them, near a roughly blocked-up
door, hangs a black-rimmed, white enamel sign reading Rue Boughedir
in Latin letters and Arabic script.

The narrow strip at the extreme left of the card shows where the cross-lane
turns a corner, and half-way down are two flimsy yellow chairs, as if they
stood outside a café. Just visible on the street behind, in a tiny space no
larger than the young man’s shirt, the bright white façade of a house, and
a prayer rug hanging from the balcony railing of a shuttered window.

On the right-hand side, an obliquely angled house-front, faced by small
square putty-coloured tiles with an elaborate arabesque pattern pressed
into their surface, occupies more than one third of the foreground. Its
facade is broken by a large wooden double entrance door that stretches
from the bottom to the top of the card. Every detail of its appearance looks
absolutely familiar: the faded chalky green paint pale as lichen, the four
squares of the lower panels like the side of a dice, the horizontal lozenge
above them, and the two narrow panels rising taller than my height,
topped by another lozenge. Each of the door’s two leaves is divided into
eight sections—that endless repetition of the number eight, curving back
on itself, which signifies eternity. The brass key hole cylinder has been
exactly placed between the lower lozenge and the taller panels on
the right hand side.

Although the scale of the picture is too small to see the fine powdery dust
thick along the panels’ curved edges, I can feel it between my fingers,
smell and taste it in my mouth as it rises in the current of air whenever
the door is closed or opened. I can sense the exact temperature of
the spring sunshine on the dry paint, note the first signs of flaking.
It could be the door of one of the houses around the Mediterranean
where I spent years of my youth.

The narrow colour range: a palette of white, grey, green, ochre, and buff
linking the plastered wall—stained by rain-splashed earth where it meets
the pale rock-strewn ground—to the greasy matted coat of the sheep and
the man’s dark jacket; and that play of line and mass, the division of space into
seven verticals of varying widths, and the horizontals of street and wall,
combine into a composition of great sophistication and make this instant
caught by an unknown photographer into a master-work.

Forthcoming  in a limited edition
with mezzotints by Judith Rothchild
published in France by Verdigris Press.