Page 159 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

punishment per failed task? The first task is to tear the letter up and eat it. In

order to receive their instructions they take turns visiting a derelict house on the
outskirts of the city, where they find that week’s instructions written on a
bedroom wall. They’re instructions for setting up various staged liaisons and the
preparation of coded, nonsensical reports. Having read and memorized the
instructions, they are to paint over them. The brother and sister are forbidden to
enter the house together. So she enters alone, he enters alone, and it wasn’t so
bad concocting slanders against each other as long as they took care not to look

each other in the eye. Another concern: Some of the staged liaisons they set up
feel all too genuine.
The siblings are so very unhappy. They can’t understand how this could be
happening to them when they’ve never put a foot wrong. A colleague makes a
jocular comment at lunch and introduces the possibility that someone in Moscow

is pissed off with the wonder siblings, finds them insincere, has settled on this
tortuous scheme to force them to dig their own graves. As you watch these
siblings squabble over daily chores and exchange bland commentary on the
doings of their neighbors there are unfortunate indications that every word of
praise these two write actually is profoundly insincere, and has been from the
outset. They have denied themselves all social bonds; everybody’s just an
acquaintance. Now they search their souls, discern silhouettes of wild horses

stampeding through the tea leaves at the bottom of their cups . . . What omens
are these? “The horses are telling us to drink something stronger than tea.” This
counsel is invaluable—the siblings dearly wish to be quiet, and it’s been their
experience that alcohol ties their tongues for them. So they drink that at the
kitchen table, facial expressions set to neutral, knees scraping together as each
stares at the amply bugged wall behind the other’s head.

—

IT’S A SPECTRAL wisp of a film, film more in the sense of a substance coating
your pupils than it is a stream of images that moves before you. It’s all felt more
than seen; tension darkens each frame; by the end you can see neither into these
siblings’ lives nor out. Neither, it seems, can they. The film seems to be a
judgment upon the written word and the stranglehold it assumes. Woe to those

who believe in what is written, and woe to those who don’t.
I put this to Aisha and she shook her head.
“It’s a puppet show,” she said. Yes, it’s that too. The film’s siblings are
played by two feminine-looking puppets and voiced by a singer and a puppeteer,