TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

John Saul

moment in the desultory rain he saw the giraffe had three eyes, then two, pleasingly, he thought, there was no bungling here, when the engineers—he saw them primarily as engineers—got on with their tasks he thought good, good luck to them, they contributed a lot on the plus side, children came and cooed and went home having it confirmed, at least for a day, that not all entertainment arrived on a screen or out of a loudspeaker, and, plain for all to see, a certain awe could still be produced without the accompaniment of music, which these days was quite an achievement. As he passed what he had always taken to be a closely planted row of white flowers and saw they were just electric bulbs, he realised the exhibits came without notes or information boards, nothing, not aword, unless Please Respect the Artists counted, so certainly not a word of explanation, unless the word Artists was some kind of giveaway, a message that Artists were special and to be venerated, from Beijing to Macau, that was surely reading too much into a single word; and in turn he realised he knew almost nothing about China and was learning nothing here either, except that pink green orange and blue appeared to be popular colours, with red reserved for the bricks on the plastic sheeting of the Disney palace walls, and that there was a willingness on the eastern visitors’ part to throw in a Noah’s Ark and a Bambi; this Chinese approach was a very unwestern approach, so unwestern he couldn’t even say what it was an approach towards, for he knew nothing, all he saw were the water-lilies on the grass and the signs to Please Respect the Artists, the only actual Chinese artist he had heard of was Ai Weiwei and he was not exactly venerated, rather he got incarcerated, but yes, he had seen a little of his work, not that the exhibition in the grounds reminded him 220