Original subtitles

It's the middle of the day.

The sky is dark.

Before me... is the sea.

Today it is flat...

heavy

with the density of iron

and lacking the energy to move.

Between the sea and the sky there's a large black stroke,

which covers the horizon,

with the regularity of a giant... smudge

marking a border

that can't be crossed.

It can be frightening.

In the mirror of my room,

upright... veiled...

by the sombre light

is my reflection.

I look outwards.

The sailboats are still there

immobile, glued to the iron sea

still in the lines of their race

where they were caught this morning

by the vanishing of the wind.

I look at myself,

barely seeing in the cold glass of the mirror.

The light is so dull...

it could be night.

I love you...

beyond my strength.

I don't know you.

See how... between the horizon and the shore,

a change has started to happen

in the depths of the sea.

It is slow.

It is late coming.

Against my skin

this cold...

of the glass

the frozen mirror.

I see myself no longer,

I see nothing more.

And now... I am seeing again.

Before me... a colour arises

it's a very intense...

green.

that takes over a part of the sea

and draws abundantly...

from that tint there.

A sea,

but smaller, you see,

a sea... inside the entirety of the sea.

The light came from there

from the bottom of the sea

an overflow of colour in its depth

and back-lit

by its thrusting out on every side

from the waters.

The sea became transparent,

with the brilliance

and lustre of nocturnal senses

One could say...

not like emerald, you see,

not phosphoric...

but like flesh.

I closed the doors... and windows of my room.

I came back quickly to write to you.

I dwell here, with you

in this discovery on the beach.

I stood away from the mirror...

and looked at myself.

Eyes blue, they say, and hair black.

Do you see? Blue...

The eyes.

under the black hair?

How I love you looking at me.

I am so beautiful,

In my exotic being

I smile at you.

And I tell you my name.

I am called... Aurelia Steiner.

I am your child.

You weren't told... of my existence.

You couldn't sign to me,

Death held you back from seeing me,

I know it.

And I, see your death as a passing illusion of your life,

such as, for example,

another love affair.

It's all the same to me.

I know of you

through myself.

For example, this morning, by that sudden terror

with no apparent object

I became aware of our profound resemblance

before the uncertainty of desire.

Sometimes...

There are others... than you.

who come by.

They are round about the age that you would be.

In a world in which you don't live...

they can stand in for our encounter.

The slim grace of their adolescent bodies

allows me to see you.

the clumsiness of approach,

the sulky impatience

and sometimes... the tears

and sometimes also the cries for help

at the edge of pleasure,

there wouldn't be much between them and you

if you, you too,

could hang out on the steps

in the quayside streets

I give my fresh body to them and they take it

They speak of her.

They say they love her

They shout, they cry...

they try to wound

I let them, I let them do

whatever they want.

Whether to penetrate, to shout of love,

to cry.

You would have been one of them

Except that you...

would have seen me.

You would have noticed this,

this abandoned body, surrendered.

this transport of joy far from you

and from which it never wants to return.

The sea, they said,

its murmur...

at the foot of the city.

Eyes closed, I would have asked you:

What are you like?

Blond?

A Northern man...

with blue eyes?

You would have, reluctantly,

after a time, replied:

Blue eyes, yes...

but with black hair.

Black?

Yes.

I would have asked: Are you looking for someone?

Someone they would have spoken to you about?

You say:

That's right.

You would have replied:

That's right, yes.

Someone that I have no way of recognising,

and that I love beyond the limit of my strength.

I ask:

Aurelia Steiner?

He doesn't reply.

He moves away from me.

He shouts:

How do you know?

I say that I heard talk of her...

By travellers on the steps

He asks.

He cries.

I say: Yes

All...

they were men with black hair.

In the room closed off from the beach,

Alone... I imagine your voice.

You talk to me and I don't hear what about,

but only your voice

Someone who's slept for a thousand years.

From now on your voice is written

faded by time,

rescued from history.

You would have run away...

and I would have heard in the town

this name called: Aurelia Steiner

I would have followed the echoes of these two words... until they faded away

And in their place...

I would have heard the rising murmur of the sea.

There would have been no wind.

I always stay in this dark room.

facing the sea.

I have been alone in this house for some years.

Everyone has returned to calmer places in the world.

Because of the storms...

here so terrible.

During the afternoon a slow separation has come about

between the green and the black water in the sea.

An immense pool

has become blue.

Movement has returned.

The sea surface trembled as under a sudden gust of wind.

There was no wind

It was night coming on

I had opened the doors and windows of my room

and a soft light entered.

The horizon became as usual...

smooth and clear.

My mother...

dead...

spread out...

under the pallets of the camp.

Cremated with

the hosts from the gas chamber

Aurelia Steiner

my mother.

My mother...

sees in front of her the large white rectangle

of the assembly yard of the camp.

Her agony is prolonged

At her side...

the child is living.

The whole sea has become blue again.

As always around this time you see an intense light,

just before the reddening of night.

I cry...

without sadness.

Evening falls on this absence...

Always.

Look...

The vast orange and gold beaches of the sky

above the sea,

which burns under that colour

already faded.

See how the sky's gold grows milky...

and then... grey.

I can't do anything

I can't do anything against the eternity

that I carry... to the place

of your last gaze,

on the white rectangle...

of the camp's assembly yard.

It was Summer.

Death had reached you.

You still could see, I think.

But by now...

You would suffer no more...

already struck

with numbness.

You were bathed in the blood of my birth.

Spilled beside you

in the dusty ground.

Around you,

hard... and cracked from the sun

that German soil,

that foreign soil...

that light

that perfect Summer,

that burning sky.

Before you...

the white rectangle...

where they died.

The storm arrived in the night.

A little after midnight, the wind

and after that, her. The sea.

It was twisted by the wind

came after it.

And prepared to attack the town

it laid siege to it, invaded it.

It dashed and smashed

collapsed the walls

the doors, the windows.

took off the roofs

And the town was left so.

Open...

gaping at the sky.

I heard the roar of the sea.

Just before dawn, in the livid whiteness,

the great silos of salt burst

and the salt spilled into the sea.

It's salinity became fatal,

It crossed, in just a few seconds...

from life to death.

The day broke.

And then...

heavy... and poisonous...

the sea was calm.

In the white rectangle...

of the assembly yard

Aurelia Steiner could still make out...

Now hanging...

the soup thief... wriggling at the end of his rope

too thin, too light,

too light.

His own weight not enough to hang him,

It's the morning of the second day.

My mother...

Eighteen years old...

dies.

Before her, at the end of his rope.

he calls her.

Cries out, in crazy love.

She no longer hears.

And here...

is the place in the world where is found Aurelia Steiner.

She understands the entire world has set itself

against the same fear.

She sees that the centre of this fear has moved,

so that it circles around her...

Aurelia Steiner.

She sees the entire world fears her.

Her...

Aurelia Steiner.

The following morning

the town is still streaming,

The sea pulls back from the land...

The streets... The parks...

The cathedrals.

The boats in the harbour are resting on their sides.

The beaches are covered in dead fish.

In the sky...

In the glassy sky...

The sun is raw and full.

The town is asleep in the blunt daylight

of the sky after a storm.

I go out, into this sleeping town

under that frightening sun.

There is the sea.

It rises up

And roaring still.

And then quietens down.

The sleep of a child...

in the midst of nightmares.

The town is bleached by the salt,

which in chaos, the sea has left.

I walk.

Little by little, without the sense of anything coming back...

you return to me from exile.

From night...

The reverse side of the world,

That dark shadow, in which you dwell.

You cross the town,

I see you go into a quayside hotel.

Today you're a sailor with black hair.

Tall.

Always this slimness, of youth

or of hunger.

You returned...

You hesitated.

And then you went away again.

I know night is coming on

you are going to the side of that street

and you will look for her,

she, the one passed this morning in town.

And who caught your eye.

Perhaps because of that light dress

And that blue gaze...

under black hair.

I was lying afloat on the deep sea

facing the glassy sky.

which was still feverish and hot.

Little girl...

Love...

Little child.

I called her by different names.

By Aurelia.

By the name Aurelia Steiner.

In its depths it's still hesitating

between exhaustion

and the desire to kill.

Sometimes great swells rise up.

Love.

All the ways we speak it

You... Child...

The sea.

I told her about the state of the town,

And then, I spoke of the history.

She was under my back,

at a depth... of ten metres?

Or of a hundred metres?

Who knows.

The difference was nothing.

Its surface was pure illusion.

An open tear,

a glazed silk.

I spoke to her for a long time.

I spoke to her about the lovers in the white rectangle of death.

I sang.

I spoke to her, I listened to the story.

I felt her under me,

Her, the mother.

With the inexorable force... of God.

When I returned a news vendor was calling out about: The anger of the sea!

In my room...

I washed my body and my hair...

in sweet water.

and then waited for the young sailor. With dark hair.

It was whilst waiting for him, I wrote to you.

Trembling with desire for him

that I love you.

I put them together through you...

And from their mass fashion you.

You are...

one who was never here...

and in this way you live.

Of all...

you re-emerge...

always... unique.

inexhaustible site of the world,

inescapable love.

You are finally dead.

They've taken you down.

you were laid out, curled up on yourself

in a negligent pose...

as in the sleep...

of a child.

The white rectangle of the yard is empty

except for your body.

The lovers are dead.

You had stolen some soup...

for the little girl.

Aurelia.

You were caught.

And you were hung.

Above you...

Three days, about...

the German sky.

Before your eyes that sky...

full of water...

and of fertile rains.

You were calling for three days

from the end of your rope.

You cried out.

Repeating without end

that a child named Aurelia Steiner

had just been born in the camp.

You pleaded that someone feed her,

That she not be fed to the dogs.

And you howled... begged everyone...

that one not forget...

the little one, Aurelia Steiner

Towards the end of the third day,

they put a bullet in your head,

to put an end to this scandal.

She, she was dead in the morning.

At her side the child.

The words Aurelia Steiner

were no longer heard in the camp.

They were taken up, elsewhere...

on other stages...

in other zones of the world.

Towards evening here...

there are bursts of light on the horizon.

Even though it has been overcast all day.

Even though it has rained.

The clouds just for a moment...

part.

and let through...

the light of the sun.

Already evening.

And I saw...

this burst of light on the sleeping mother.

I closed her eyes.

I had just done that.

I seemed to stop writing to you.

Somehow, in this way...

I saw the colour, liquid... and blue.

of those eyes empty and already claimed by death.

of the young man hung in the assembly yard.

I also saw her youth.

Eighteen years old, too.

She had perhaps grown to her full height.

I don't know her name.

It's strange, you see.

That I can't see the mother...

under the sleeping pallet.

Nothing of her

except the gesture of hiding her child.

The black haired sailor is outside the window.

He looks at me.

He asks where I'm from.

I say I don't know.

He says he was on the beach.

He barely remembers the woman he met in town this morning.

He says he met another woman.

I ask him which one he's after.

He says the one from this morning.

I tell him it was me.

I say to him: I'm going to give you a name.

You'll say it back.

You won't understand why

and yet I want you to do it.

To repeat it...

without understanding why.

As if there was something to understand.

I say to him the name:

Aurelia Steiner.

I write it... on a blank page

and hand it to him.

He deciphers it slowly

then he looks up to see if he's read it correctly.

I say nothing.

I lie down near him.

He repeats the name.

He sees that I'm listening.

He is clumsy starting out.

Not knowing what language to speak in.

And then...

he throws away the paper.

He comes towards me...

and speaks to me with that name.

One would think he had all the time in the world.

Immeasurable.

He begins to explore the body of Aurelia Steiner.

She never looks at him.

her eyes are closed, on the white rectangle of death.

Sometime he says the whole name.

Sometimes only the first name.

Sometimes only the last.

He can no longer say any other word.

He says them amidst kisses...

lips against the skin.

Speaks in a low voice.

He cries them.

He calls them from inside the body...

against the mouth...

Against the wall.

Sometimes he grows still

one might think he'd forgotten the names.

Then from deep down, once again, he says again...

With a painful effort.

As if just bringing them out...

were painful.

He says:

Juden

Juden Aurelia,

Juden Aurelia Steiner.

He brings himself to the entrance to the body of Aurelia Steiner.

And he pauses there.

With extreme care in bringing this torture to its conclusion.

Then he enters the body.

In a very slow movement...

exactly opposite...

to his ferocity,

he enters, the body of Aurelia Steiner.

The slowness makes the lovers cry out.

And again...

he says the names,

he repeats them low, again.

And again he says the names.

He repeats again,

but voiceless, in a heedless brutality.

In an unknown accent.

I woke up as the day was starting.

The black-haired sailor was lying on the floor of my room.

He looked at me.

I heard him say that his eyes...

were burning... from having looked on the beauty

of Aurelia Steiner.

And that his boat leaves at midday...

but he wouldn't be on board.

That the boat would go without him,

That he wanted to stay with her, Aurelia Steiner.

Whatever would become of him.

I said that I could belong to no one person.

That I was not free with myself.

My name is...

Aurelia Steiner.

I live in Vancouver...

where my parents are teachers.

I'm eighteen years old.

I write.