The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

  ‘And how is the walking?’ Walter gestured in a general sort of way to my feet. ‘Are you still lame?’

  I closed my eyes and touched the ends of my hair, which is what I always do when I am overwhelmed.

  ‘Walter, if you’re going to follow me around, you will know all about that.’

  9

  The weeds at the side of the road outside the dacha had been cut and bundled. Walter told me he planned to give them to the farmer to add to animal feed. It was raining hard as we walked around his allotment. He wanted to show me the vegetables he was cultivating, particularly the cabbages and potatoes. ‘You can grow a lot of potatoes by planting potatoes.’ Walter seemed pleased about the rain because he had recently put a new roof on the dacha. All the hammering had irritated one of the neighbours who used to be a broadcaster on state television, so he hoped the hard work had been worth it. His jeans and T-shirt were soaking wet, so was his hair, but he did not want to share my umbrella. I felt very English and uptight hanging on to it anyway, so I chucked it on the grass and stood closer to him as the rain pelted down. He wanted me to tell him about the graffiti on the west side of the Wall. Obviously he had never seen it – what did I think?

  I couldn’t tell him what I was thinking, because he had been following me home from the library. Instead, I told him how I grew three types of tomato in Britain.

  ‘I’ve planted the usual plum, then San Marzano and the big ones, Costoluto Fiorentino.’

  ‘What kind of soil?’ Walter was curious. He did not see me as a tomato grower and neither did I.

  ‘I grow the tomatoes in Suffolk, an East Anglian county in England.’

  He did not believe me and neither did I totally believe myself. I had planted three types of tomato in another time. Someone had planted the tomatoes with me in the future soil of East Anglia. His hair is silver and he wears it in a bun on top of his head. His fingernails are bitten down. We are kneeling on the earth, his fingers on my back, massaging my spine while he tells me we should plant the apple trees before it rains and the fields flood.

  The rain seemed to encourage Walter to talk. He told me he was thinking of starting a honeybee farm.

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  He would begin with just one or two hives and put them where there was nectar, near the pollen of flowering plants. There would have to be shade and sun but no wind.

  ‘My sister has misgivings. She is very prone to screaming when a bee lands on her arm. She is a nurse and always ready with her tweezers to take out the sting.’

  ‘Perhaps you should keep a cat instead?’

  ‘Agh.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t talk about cats. Luna has a phobia about cats.’

  Every now and again he bent down to rip a dead leaf from a plant.

  ‘So far, we have been talking about potatoes and cabbage, bees and cats and tomatoes,’ he said. ‘So now let’s speak quietly in the rain about the ashes in your matchbox. You want to bury your father in my garden?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  I stood there in the rain, unable to move. I could not bring myself to bury my father. I suddenly felt light-headed and drowsy. I lifted my head to the sky and opened my mouth to the rain. As if it were an opiate, perhaps morphine, as if it could numb some sort of undisclosed suffering. Walter picked up the umbrella I had thrown on the grass.

  I think he was trying to say he was sorry for me.

  When the rainstorm was over, Walter took me mushrooming in the woods. For some reason he was wearing a trilby hat made from felt. It didn’t look that good but he seemed very attached to it. Walter knew where the mushrooms would be bursting through the soil.

  ‘They have deep root systems under the ground and they like the rain, so when we see one poke its head above ground we must first identify if it is poisonous.’

  He told me he was wearing the hat so he could duck under the branches of trees that created shade for the fungi. He wanted to teach me everything about mushrooms. While he spoke, he sometimes touched my arm for emphasis as we walked deeper into the woods.

  ‘When people camp here they sometimes get ill and even die because they have eaten the deadly ones.’ There was apparently an interesting man who ran the local pharmacy. He could identify all the mushrooms and he offered a professional mushroom-identification service. I had rolled up my shirtsleeves but Walter told me to cover my arms because the ticks were bloodthirsty. The smaller mushrooms were tastier than the bigger ones, so that’s what we were looking for. If there were frosts it would be the end of the season, but we were apparently in luck because it was still warm.

  We were both now squatting over a cluster of mushrooms.

  ‘This one is likely to be poisonous.’ He turned it over with a twig, both of us concealed under the heavy branches of a tall dripping tree. Walter leaned forward to look at it more closely, which meant our heads were touching. Rain dripped down our cheeks. And then he kissed me on my lips. When I did not move away, both of us still squatting over the poisonous mushroom, he bit my lower lip, gently, then fiercely. His second kiss was less polite, his fingers tracing my cheekbones and eyebrows. The damp earth and the cries of small animals and the musky smell of the mushrooms and the taste of him were the sort of life I wanted. I was electrified by Walter Müller. When we pulled apart he said in German, ‘This one is such a beauty,’ but I didn’t know if he was referring to the mushroom or myself.

  As the light faded that night, we closed the curtains in the dacha. Our clothes were still damp; we had been drinking schnapps and had nearly finished the bottle. Both of us were drunk.

  ‘When I first saw you, Saul, at the station in Friedrichstraße, you were like an angel, full lips, high cheekbones, blue eyes, a classical body like a statue, but then I discovered your wings were wounded. I had to carry your bag and you became human.’

  It was raining again. We could hear water running off the roof.

  ‘I was trying hard to be a man you could respect,’ I replied.

  ‘And when we got home you said anything that came into your head.’

  He was speaking in German and I was too drunk to understand all of what he was saying, but then he changed the subject, no warning, his authoritarian voice coming back like a spectre lurking inside him. He asked if I wanted him to help translate the lecture I was to deliver on Monday to eight students on a cultural exchange programme. No, I told him, it was straightforward. He looked at me in a certain way and I agreed without speaking to something I had understood when we exchanged looks in the mirror of his mother’s apartment. I said yes with my eyes and I reached out (again) to pull him closer. Perhaps I was becoming the cat and less of the mouse. I felt his physical strength when we were lying on the floor. His desire was like a lamp, an old-fashioned lamp with a wick and paraffin, smouldering, flickering, his body bigger than mine, his thighs harder, his skin pale, so very pale. I was tanned compared to Walter Müller.

  When he took off his jeans, he actually stood up to fold them and place them on a chair. He did not walk towards me again, he just stood there by the chair, which forced me to walk towards him. I was terrified because it was proof that I wanted him. I wanted this as much as he wanted it, but he kept giving me the opportunity to walk away. I don’t know why he did that. He was taunting me, but the taunt was something like, yes, you are choosing this, you want it too.

  Later, when we were lying on the floor on our backs, his arm across my chest, I realized the temperature had dropped. It had suddenly become very cold. He asked about the bruise on my thigh which was the size of a saucer. When I explained it was from the near collision on Abbey Road, he kissed the bruise and then he kissed my lips, which were not bruised. I could hear my own frantic heartbeat pounding in my ears.

  ‘Walter, I have to ask you something.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  The rain was now falling hard. The sound of water everywhere.

  ‘If we had been friends earlier, say 1941, I woul
d have had to ask you to hide me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you have helped me?’

  ‘Of course. No doubt about it.’

  ‘And what if we had been at school together and you discovered I was forbidden from swimming with you at the public pools. Would you still have been my friend?’

  ‘More than that, Saul. I would have done everything I could to save you.’

  The questions I was asking Walter were not fair. I understood they were taboo questions, but what was I supposed to do with these questions?

  I would have done everything I could to save you.

  I believed Walter Müller’s words. They expressed themselves to me in sound. Like a typewriter hammering in my head.

  Would you still have been my friend?

  More than that, Saul. I would have done everything I could to save you.

  At the same time, I knew he was following me when I visited the British embassy to have a cup of British tea and read the newspapers. I had seen him smoking outside the building every time I was there. I knew his heart was not in it, but he had to save himself.

  Walter seemed to have no shame about his naked body. He walked around the kitchen making coffee. There was no milk, no sugar, but he had bought some meat which he planned to cook with sour apples and potatoes as soon as he had sobered up. It was cold, despite Ursula’s news of the young people of Leipzig cooling off in the fountain. Walter was only a few years older than myself, but he seemed very much older. Protective of his mother and sister. More domesticated. Kinder. Good at gardening, cooking and putting up a roof. I wrapped a blanket over my shoulders. While he looked for sugar he asked again about my late father, avoiding the subject of the matchbox with its teaspoon of forlorn ash.

  ‘My father raised my brother and me in the spirit of socialism and peace. We were to be highly principled and never exploit anyone to make ourselves richer. He was an internationalist, not a nationalist, he declared his solidarity with working people around the world. All the same I think he wanted to purge me from the family.’

  I was now shivering under the blanket.

  ‘As far as he was concerned, I was always on trial.’

  In reply, Walter pointed to my pearl necklace.

  ‘I expect it belonged to your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I told him how when she died I had asked my father for her necklace. Pearls absorb the heat of the body and become part of it. I had never given much thought to a pearl belonging to a gender. If I had to fight in a war I’d have to take off my pearls, so obviously I was for world peace all round.

  Walter told me that his parents were divorced and his father was a trade union steward. They got on all right, but he was closer to Ursula, who was ‘happier in her mind’. He told me to be discreet about our weekend in the dacha. He was considered by his university to be politically reliable and he had high qualifications. All the same he could be removed from his job if it was thought that his sexuality in any way threatened to destabilize the regime.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘As for burying your father’s ashes in my garden, you will have to consult with my sister. This is her dacha as much as mine.’

  ‘I would like to see you again, Walter.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  All those yeses were the same as him starting and stopping when we were murmuring and gasping on the floor.

  Yes?

  Yes.

  Yes?

  Maybe the Stasi were right to wave their pencils over the lyrics of pop songs.

  Yeah yeah yeah. What could that possibly mean?

  I was still shivering under the blanket.

  ‘You English do not like being naked.’ Walter was now peeling three tiny, gnarled potatoes with intense focus. ‘But I am going to take you swimming in one of our best lakes and you will be naked for this swimming because it is unhygienic to wear clothes in water.’

  I asked him to tell me about Luna. Where was she and why had I not yet met her?

  ‘Oh, you will meet Luna!’ He started to laugh, as he always did when he spoke about his sister. Apparently, she refused to stay in the dacha alone. She was an insomniac, a nocturnal person. And she had many fears. Mostly about animals. The first, but not strongest, fear was the wolves that had migrated from western Poland and sometimes roamed the countryside looking for sheep. There were good reasons, he said, why wolves howl at the moon. Raising their heads helps carry sound further. Their howl is a form of long-distance communication and it conveys all kinds of information. Luna was not scared that a wolf would maul her, she was terrified of the way it raised its head.

  The meat he had bought for our dinner turned out to be liver. I watched him rinse the tubes and tendons under the tap. Are there tendons in liver?

  ‘I like to cook. So does Katrin.’

  ‘Who is Katrin?’

  ‘Luna. I will leave the mushrooms for her.’

  When I stood up with the cup of coffee in my hand and started to pace the kitchen, trying to keep warm, I managed to trip over a pile of old boots on the floor. The cup fell from my hand and the coffee spilled on to the jeans that had been folded and placed on the chair. Walter threw down the liver and ran to the chair, grabbed his jeans and swiftly carried them to the sink. He wet a cloth and started to rub at the black stain on the denim. He was shouting, ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’ I realized the jeans were Wrangler’s, hard to get in the GDR, and that he must have worn them specially for me.

  I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘You can have my jeans, Walter. You are bigger than I am but they will fit you.’

  Later, much later, when the sun was coming up and we were lying in bed, he said, ‘Okay, thank you for the jeans. Accepted.’

  In a small way I felt I had made up for forgetting to bring the tin of pineapple. He suggested I should spend next weekend with Luna here at the dacha because she was scared to be alone. His sister had promised to look after the elderly neighbour who was unwell, but she was frightened of the jaguar.

  ‘I thought she was scared of the wolves?’

  ‘Yes. And the jaguar.’

  ‘You mean a jaguar like a leopard?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was lying on his side, smoking a cigarette and laughing again.

  Apparently, a black jaguar had been spotted near the dacha some years back. No one knew where it had come from. There had been photographs in all the newspapers. It was a mystery because jaguars are usually from South America or Arizona. It liked to climb trees and pounce on its prey, so now Luna would not walk under trees. Walter was still laughing.

  ‘But most of all,’ he said, ‘jaguars like water.’

  Apparently, this East German jaguar had also been spotted hunting for fish in a lake. There was an idea it was a female jaguar and that it was pregnant. So someone else wrote to the newspapers to say baby jaguars had been spotted in a forest near the lake.

  While Walter spoke at length about jaguars, I was looking at a calendar pinned on to the wooden walls of the dacha, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the first joint Soviet–East German space flight.

  ‘You know, Walter, I think I have seen that jaguar.’

  ‘So, you’re crazy like Luna? Where did you see it?’

  ‘It’s silver,’ I said. ‘It’s not black.’

  ‘You saw the jaguar here or near the university?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette in an old sardine tin.

  ‘When you meet my sister, it’s best to tell her we’re just friends. Okay with you?’

  ‘Okay with me.’

  He pointed to a pair of pale pink ballet shoes lying under the table.

  ‘They belong to Luna. Sometimes when she can’t sleep she dances in the night to calm herself.’

  After we cleaned the dacha and locked the front door, I saw a white Wartburg parked opposite Walter’s allotment. Two men were sitting inside it, smoking and talking. Walte
r did not seem to notice the men in the car when I whispered they were there. He and I had a weird moment on the doorstep. I said, ‘Stop typing, Walter,’ and he replied, ‘You really are crazy, Saul,’ but as he put the keys in his pocket, I saw his eyes flick in the direction of the Wartburg that was apparently not there.

  10

  When I at last met Luna, she was upside down.

  She was brushing her long hair in endless repetitions near the ceramic stove in the apartment and reading a book at the same time. I couldn’t see her face because she had bent her head towards the floor so her light blond hair touched the carpet. She was reading ‘Howl’ by the poet Allen Ginsberg. I asked her how she’d got hold of her copy.

  ‘Rainer, of course.’

  I thought she had a lisp at first but later she told me she’d had a tiny sliver of chocolate under her tongue and talking too much would have spoilt her pleasure. Her aunt from the West had sent her a birthday package and she was trying to make the chocolate last. She was in her mid twenties and petite, quite different from her muscular older brother. When she flicked her head up again, her light blond hair, the colour of a cloud, was electric from all the brushing. It fell down to her narrow waist. When she finally looked at me, I had the impression she had been taking her time, as if preparing herself to gaze at something painful, or thrilling, or frightening. Her eyes were pale green, her skin luminous. Walter’s features were not as defined as Luna’s. It was as if his face was still becoming his face, he was not quite himself, which was very attractive to me. And so was the way he looked at me all the time. He couldn’t take his eyes off me, which I confess I found flattering. It was the other way around with Luna, who couldn’t bear to look at me. She shook my hand in a formal manner and asked if I had enjoyed the weekend in the dacha with her brother.

  ‘Yes, thank you. We collected mushrooms and drank something strong. It was a restful break from my research.’