The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

  We had quite vigorous sex and afterwards I really began to ache. It was clear that something was wrong with my hip, which wasn’t bruised at all.

  We lazed around and finished the bottle of wine and talked. After a while Jennifer asked me what I most wanted in life.

  ‘I would like to see my mother again.’

  It wasn’t the sexiest answer, but I knew it would interest Jennifer.

  ‘Then perhaps you should visit her.’

  ‘You know she’s dead.’

  ‘Go to your family house in Bethnal Green and tell me what happens.’

  She had found a stick of charcoal and was balancing a sheet of paper across her naked thighs.

  ‘I can see cobblestones and a Gothic university,’ I said.

  Her hand did not move across the page.

  ‘I thought you were going to draw?’

  ‘Well, there isn’t a Gothic university in Bethnal Green. I’d rather draw your mother than a building. Do you miss her more than your father?’

  It was hard work being tangled up with someone like Jennifer Moreau. We heard the front door slam.

  ‘That will be Claudia.’ Jennifer placed my hand in the middle of the sheet of paper and drew around my fingers with the stick of charcoal. Her bedroom was next to the kitchen and we could hear Claudia filling the kettle.

  I was lying on my back and could see a bunch of flowering nettles on Jennifer’s green Mexican desk in the corner of the room (made from wormwood, or something that sounded sinister), also her passport, also a pile of black-and-white photographs. I wanted to tell Jennifer that I loved her, but I thought it might put her off me.

  The bedroom door suddenly creaked open. Claudia, who always soaked seaweed overnight, was naked because she was about to step into the sauna, a pink towel wrapped around her head. She was yawning, slowly, massively, languorously, as if the whole world bored her shitless, one arm stretched above her head while her left hand rested on her flat tanned stomach.

  I asked Jennifer Moreau if she would consider marrying me. In that moment I felt as if I had just split an atom. She leaned forward and followed my gaze.

  ‘You know, I think it’s over between us, Saul. We should call it a day, but I’ll send you the Abbey Road photos anyway. Have a good time in East Berlin. I hope it works out with your visa.’

  She lay back on the pillow next to me and pulled the pilot cap over her face so she did not have to look at me.

  I stepped out of bed, slightly drunk, and closed the dodgy bedroom door, tripping over the empty bottle of wine we had thrown on to the scratched floorboards.

  ‘Your white suit is on the chair,’ she said. ‘Can you get dressed quickly? I have to get into the dark room at college before they lock it tonight.’

  I had bought the suit at Laurence Corner, the army surplus store on the Euston Road. It was where the Beatles had found their Sergeant Pepper jackets in the 1960s. I think my white suit used to be a Navy uniform, which was just as well because my marriage proposal had sunk to the bottom of the sea. I was shipwrecked amongst the empty oyster shells with their jagged sharp edges and I could taste Jennifer Moreau on my fingers and lips. When I perched next to her on the bed and asked her why she was suddenly so angry with me, she did not seem to know, or understand, or care. She was calm and rather cold, I thought, as if she had been thinking about this for a while.

  ‘Well, apart from anything else, you have never once asked me about my art.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was shouting now. ‘There’s your art, it’s on your walls, there and there.’ I pointed to two collages taped on the wall of her room. One of them was a blown-up black-and-white photograph of my face in profile, hung above the bed like a religious icon. She had traced over the outline of my lips in red felt-tip and written the words DON’T KISS ME.

  ‘I look at your art all the time.’ I was still shouting. ‘I think about it and I think about you. I am interested.’

  ‘Well, seeing as you’re so interested, what am I working on now?’

  ‘I don’t know, you haven’t told me.’

  ‘You haven’t asked. So, what kind of camera do I use?’

  She knew I had no idea. It was not as if Jennifer had much interest in communist Eastern Europe either. I mean, she hadn’t exactly asked me for a reading list and I didn’t hold it against her.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘you took a negative of me and taped it on your shoulder and lay in the sun and then you peeled it off and you had a sort of tattoo of me on your skin.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s always about you, isn’t it?’

  In a way it was. After all, Jennifer Moreau was always taking photographs of me.

  When the bedroom door creaked open again, Claudia was eating baked beans from the tin with a giant spoon.

  ‘Jennifer’ – I was pleading now – ‘I’m sorry. Since my father died I’ve just been trying to get through the day.’

  We could hear the hiss of the kettle boiling on the other side of the door.

  ‘As it happens,’ she said, jumping out of bed and slamming the door shut again, ‘a curator from America came to my studio and bought two of my photographs. And she has offered me an artist’s residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after I graduate.’

  So that’s why her passport was lying on her desk.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said miserably.

  She looked so excited and young and mean. We had been together for just over a year but I knew I had met my match. For a start, the deal that Jennifer Moreau (French father, English mother, born in Beckenham, South London) had made with me was that she could praise my own sublime beauty (as she put it) in any way she liked, the shape of my body, my ‘intense blue eyes’, but I was never to describe her own body, or express my admiration for it, except with touch. That is how she wanted to know everything I felt and thought about her.

  Claudia had now switched off the wailing kettle. When I glanced at the wall again I noticed a photograph of Saanvi taped to the crumbling plaster. The basement flat was damp and some sort of fungus crept like deranged ants over the walls of Jennifer’s bedroom. In the photograph, Saanvi lay sweating on her side in the sauna. She was reading a book, her left nipple pierced with a small golden hoop.

  ‘Get going, Saul. I don’t know why you’re still hanging around.’

  Jennifer slipped on a kimono with a dragon embroidered on the back and then edged her feet into her favourite sandals, which were made from car tyres.

  She was practically pushing me out of the door.

  I spent some time fiddling with the latch on the front gate. I never could get in or out of that gate; I had watched Jennifer and Claudia leap over it on days they were late for class. Their other flatmate, Saanvi, had no problem with the latch because she was patient, but Jennifer said that was because she had a degree in Advanced Mathematics and knew a lot about limitless time.

  The late-afternoon sunshine felt harsh on my eyes. My intense blue eyes. I suddenly turned around because I intuited that Jennifer was watching me. And she was. With a camera in her hand. She was standing by the front door in her dragon kimono and sandals made from car tyres, still flushed from making love with me, her left hand rummaging in her silk pockets, searching for the jelly beans she always kept there. Her camera was pointed at me. As it whirred and clicked, she said, quite dramatically, ‘So long, Saul. You’ll always be my muse.’

  For a moment I thought she was going to throw me a jelly bean in the way that circus trainers throw treats to their performing animals after they have jumped through a flaming hoop.

  ‘I’ll get the Abbey Road photos to you before you leave. I’m sorry about your father. Hope you feel better soon, and don’t forget the tinned pineapple for your translator.’

  Abbey Road was a twelve-minute walk from Hamilton Terrace. Something compelled me to return to the site of the near accident. I would have to take it slowly because I noticed I was limping and that my white jacket was torn at the shoulder. Jennifer Morea
u was ruthless and she seemed to know a lot about my life. How did she know that Walter Müller had requested I bring a tin of pineapple with me to the GDR? I couldn’t remember if it was because I had told her or she’d asked. It was true that she had accompanied me to my father’s funeral three weeks ago, so she knew about his death. Her own father had died when she was twelve, as had my mother. We often talked about losing a parent at the same age. It was a bond between us, though she thought she was freed by her father’s death because he would never have allowed her to go to art school. I’m not sure that I was freed by my mother’s death. No, I couldn’t see anything good about it, except that I never doubted her love for me, which made her absence even more of a catastrophe. All the same, my father’s funeral was a reminder of Jennifer’s own early loss and I had felt protective of her. My callous brother, Matthew, also known as Fat Matt (a full English breakfast seven days a week – three English eggs, three English sausages), had arranged the funeral service without consulting me.

  I had been proud to have glamorous Jennifer Moreau on my arm, what with her exotic French surname, vintage powder-blue trouser suit and matching suede platform boots. I had watched Fat Matt and his shabby wife and their two young sons sitting in the front pew like they were the royals of the family, and wondered what it was that I had done so wrong in their eyes, apart from wearing a pearl necklace.

  I was minor family, it seemed: unmarried, no children, relegated to the second row. It was a reminder of the crashing loneliness of my teenage years when Matt, who was not yet fat, and a Bolshevik hero in my father’s eyes, started working as an electrician, earning good money while I was trying out the tester eyeliner pencils in the local chemist. By the time I got to Cambridge University he knew how to rewire a whole house while I was perfecting ways to disguise my ignorance (intense blue eyes help this endeavour) and make the most of being the raven-haired working-class cat (no claws, high cheekbones) amongst the posh pigeons.

  Matt gave a loving tribute to our father. When it was my turn all I could say, as the most educated person in the family, was ‘Goodbye, Dad.’

  My brother did agree, though, to my idea of taking a portion of our communist father’s ashes with me to be buried in the GDR. After all, he believed in it.

  I glanced at the tall Edwardian villas that lined either side of Hamilton Terrace as I limped down the long, wide road, still trying to remember how Jennifer knew about the tin of pineapple I had been instructed to purchase by Walter Müller. Had she read his letter to me? Stasi informers were known as ears and eyes, Horch und Guck. It would seem that when it came to Jennifer’s art my eyes were closed, my ears were deaf, but actually I was frantically preparing to leave for East Germany, making administrative arrangements to access the archives I would need for my research. The reason I had been given permission to do so was that I had promised to engage sensitively in a paper I would write about the realities of everyday life in the GDR. Instead of the usual cold-war stereotypes, I would focus on education, health care and housing for all its citizens, all of which I had discussed with my father before he died.

  ‘If you had ever had to fight a fascist you would put up a wall to keep them out, too.’

  When I reminded him the Wall was put up to keep people in, not out, he told me I was the Marie Antoinette of the family and the pearls did not help.

  ‘Take them off, son.’

  In his view, freedom of speech and movement were not as important as eliminating inequalities and working for the collective good, but then he could catch the ferry to France any time he liked and no one was going to shoot him from a watchtower in Dover. He turned a blind eye to the Soviet tanks rolling through Prague in 1968 because he obviously thought we were related to Stalin.

  ‘The Soviet Union is the GDR’s godfather. Family must look after each other and protect their kin from reactionary adversaries.’

  Yeah yeah yeah.

  Like Matt looked after his brother when the boys tried to hang me with my tie from the upper deck of the bus. My father disliked what Jennifer described as my ‘sublime beauty’; for some reason it offended him. To make it worse, I was physically weaker than my brother and sometimes wore an orange silk tie when I kept our father company in the pub. I once heard him order a pint of bitter for himself and a ‘glass of red for the nancy boy’. The barman asked my father if he was okay with Merlot, and handed me the pint of bitter. As a compromise, I laid off the mascara when I attended his talks at Communist Party meetings and replaced the orange silk with a green flat cap made from faux snakeskin. Whenever he was in a bad mood (often) during my early teens, he would shout to Matt, Stalin-style, ‘Beat him, beat him,’ and Matt, as his accomplice, would punch me down to the floor. Matt was a serious puncher after our mother died. He once split my lip and gave me two intense black eyes, which apparently were more acceptable than my intense blue eyes. It was as if my father’s tanks were always parked in the living room of our house in Bethnal Green, ready to roll over my unworthy thirteen-year-old body with their guns raised.

  Goodbye, Dad. What else could I say at his funeral?

  A lot.

  The difference between my father and myself, apart from my education and high cheekbones, was that I believed that people had to be convinced and not coerced. But now that he was dead and couldn’t answer back, I missed his certainty.

  I was about seven minutes away from the zebra crossing.

  Now and then I had to stop to get my breath back. Jennifer’s voice kept returning to me. Can you tell me what actually happened, Saul?

  I resolved to make a note about not forgetting the tin of pineapple. I would write it in capital letters and stick it on the fridge with my ‘Zeus the God of the Gods’ magnet as soon as I arrived home. In return, Walter Müller had written, he would give me a jar of pickled cucumber, the Emerald of the East, made with fennel and thyme, sugar and vinegar. I wondered if he was aware that the Stasi would be reading his letters? If Stasi informers were known as eyes and ears, it would seem that Jennifer had dumped me because my ears weren’t listening and my eyes were closed when it came to her art, and come to think of it, and I did think of it as I picked up speed, I could not recall anything she had told me about her current project, except that I was her muse. Also, I realized that after all the effort to pick up the condoms after the accident, I had not actually used them. They were unopened in the pocket of my torn white jacket.

  It was strangely comforting to return to the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. There was no traffic, so it was likely that it had been closed after all.

  It occurred to me that when I had first stepped on to that crossing, I had a girlfriend and I was not limping. What came to mind as I sat on the wall outside the EMI studios was the way in which the man who had nearly run me over had touched my hair, as if he were touching a statue or something without a heartbeat.

  While I was thinking about this, a woman came up to me waving an unlit cigarette in her hand. She was wearing a blue dress and asked if I had a light. Her short blond hair was so light it was almost silver. Her eyes were the palest green, like glass washed up on a beach. I reached into my pocket and found the metal Zippo lighter I always carried with me, a windproof, old-fashioned, clunky version of the lighter the American military used in the Second World War – later in Vietnam. She grabbed my hand with the lighter in it and peered at the initials carved into the carriage. I explained that it had belonged to my father in the days he used to smoke while he was having his monthly bath. He had died recently and I was taking a small portion of his ashes in a matchbox to bury in communist East Berlin. My hands were shaking as I spoke. I asked her to sit with me for a while, and she did, perching on the wall of the EMI studios, our shoulders touching. I could hear her inhaling and exhaling. Smoke was coming out of her nostrils like the dragon embroidered on Jennifer’s kimono. She asked if I was a jittery person.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Nervous then?’

  A fragment of a poem I did not know I
knew came to mind. I spoke it out loud to the woman smoking her cigarette.

  ‘We are the Dead. Short days ago,

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved …’

  She nodded as if I were being normal, which I wasn’t.

  ‘It’s by John McCrae,’ I said. ‘He was a Canadian doctor but he signed up as a gunner in the First World War.’

  I turned my face towards her and she turned towards me while the wind blew a plastic bag from a supermarket around our feet.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said, kicking it away. ‘Isn’t Wal-Mart American?’

  We kissed on the wall like teenagers, her tongue deep in my mouth, my knee wedged between her thighs. When we finally pulled apart, she asked what kind of perfume I was wearing. ‘Ylang-ylang,’ I said, as she wrote down her telephone number on the palm of my shaking hand. When she walked away, I read the words on the back of her blue dress. It was a uniform. I realized that she was a nurse and that in the song ‘Penny Lane’ there is a nurse who sells poppies from a tray.

  3

  When I arrived home I picked up the telephone and asked a local florist to send a bunch of sunflowers to Hamilton Terrace. I wanted Jennifer to receive them on the day of her graduation show. ‘We only have roses’: the florist sounded indignant, as if no other kinds of flowers existed in her world. She even seemed offended to hear that although sunflowers were at their peak in August, they were still widely available in September. It was odd to speak to a florist who was terrified of flowers. When I told her that just as sunflowers were coming into bloom, other sorts of flowers were nearing the end of their season, such as poppies, she sounded like she was about to burst into tears.

  ‘We have yellow roses, white roses, red roses, striped roses from China and Burma. Any good? We have a lot of white roses in stock at the moment.’

  White roses. Die Weiße Rose – ‘the White Rose’. That was the name of the anti-Nazi youth movement in the early 1940s that had started in Munich. I was translating a leaflet for my students, written by the leaders of die Weiße Rose in February 1943.