The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

  I asked him if he had a lover.

  ‘In a way I do.’

  I began to understand more about the way Walter spoke in English and German. He did not speak spontaneously, certainly not the first thoughts that came to mind. Perhaps he said the third thought that came to mind. It was not a matter of finding a flow but finding a way to stop the flow. I asked him again if he had a lover.

  ‘Yes. I have a companion.’

  I punched his arm and he punched my arm. We understood the punch but it was not how our bodies wanted to speak to each other. A punch? No. When we were alone in the dacha he spoke freely with his body. And that is something I have never done. I have never had a free conversation with my body. I have silenced my lovers with my body and controlled the kind of conversation they wished to have with their own body. I have never been free. I have pretended to be more tender or turned on than I felt, or more aggressive than I felt, and when we came close to something more intimate, I pulled away, interrupted the physical conversation. Yet with Walter, I was free with my body. This was to do with the way we had talked on the first day he met me at the station. It was true that my wings were wounded. It was true that I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it. Responsibility. Love. Death. Sex. Loneliness. History. I knew he did not hold my tears against me. That was a big thing to know.

  It was a warm day. The scent from the pine trees and the blue sky and Walter at my side seemed to heighten my lust and misery and happiness. The odd thing was that those words, lust, misery, happiness, were the words in a title of one of Jennifer’s portraits of me. I wondered if I was starting to become the man she had seen from behind her lens.

  I said very softly to Walter, ‘I will miss you when I leave.’ He did not reply for a while, but then he shrugged. ‘I am happy to offer you my comradeship.’ He raised his left eyebrow and looked up at the tree. A small wooden platform had been built in its branches. A uniformed guard was standing on the planks, smoking a cigarette. Was Walter being cautious or was he unwriting his first thought? He had not censored his first thought when he’d touched me. His hands had been fluent in every language, his lips soft, his body hard.

  We were now walking along a pathway that wound around the lake.

  ‘What about Jennifer? Do you miss her?’

  It was startling to hear Jennifer’s name spoken out loud in that forest, so far away from my old life, even though I was thinking about her. Luna must have talked to her brother about the photograph of Abbey Road.

  ‘Jennifer is clever and ambitious.’ The way I said those words sounded like a reproach and I was slightly ashamed.

  I couldn’t tell Walter that as well as starting to feel the words with which she had titled one of her portraits of her main subject – me – there were new images in my mind that resembled Jennifer’s photographs, images from another geography, another time. I was convinced that Jennifer had not yet taken those photographs, which I saw like slides in a carousel. A cherry tree in Massachusetts, America. Someone standing under the tree. That person might be myself. Jennifer was there, too. Her hair had turned white. Someone else was there, but the image was blurred.

  ‘I sometimes miss Jennifer.’

  We took off our clothes and left them on the shore of the clear green lake. I felt something touch me, like a butterfly near my neck. Walter had slipped his finger under my pearls. I told him I never took off my necklace, not even to swim. As I waded into the water I felt sand between my toes. I kept on walking. The sand was still there and I was now up to my neck in the water.

  ‘Lift your feet, Saul.’

  ‘I am avoiding the turtle,’ I replied.

  ‘There are no turtles in this lake.’

  I think the turtle came from another lake in another time, but I was still reluctant to lift my feet from the comforting sand. Walter dunked his head in the water and I eventually lifted my feet. We swam past the tall trees towards the island. After about twenty minutes, I was shivering. The water was surprisingly cold. Walter was waving to someone. There was no one there. Yet he had seen someone who was there. The calm, still water broke into a gentle froth.

  Walter shouted across the lake in German: ‘Good morning, Wolf.’

  We swam together towards the invisible man called Wolf.

  The man was on his back, kicking his legs, whirling his arms. He opened his eyes. Dark brown eyes. Slanted at the corners. He was not looking at me but I was looking at him because I had seen him before. I was treading water now, out of my depth, but I was sure he was the man who had nearly run me over on Abbey Road in London. Walter tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Wolf is the director of our university.’

  Wolf fleetingly opened his brown slanting eyes again. He was looking at Walter, not at me. There was something in that look that made me think he was Walter’s lover. As if to prove it, Walter swam behind the floating man’s head, gripped both his wrists and stretched Wolf’s arms behind his head, as if to improve his swimming stroke.

  ‘It’s true,’ Wolf said in German, ‘I am stiffer than I used to be.’ He turned his gaze towards me.

  ‘We Germans invented all the big movements of the twentieth century. Phenomenology from Heidegger and Hegel, communism from Marx and Engels. So you will have to excuse us for being a little stiff in our limbs – we have been busy.’

  His dark slanting eyes closed again, but not before his gaze had momentarily wandered to the necklace of white pearls I never took off, not to make love or to write essays or to teach my students or to cross the road.

  Yet how could Wolf be the same person who nearly ran me over? The man on Abbey Road was English. How old are you, Soorl? Can you tell me where you live?

  A fish flicked against my ankles.

  ‘I wonder,’ I asked in German, ‘if we have met before in London?’

  Wolf’s slanting eyes peeped open. Walter stood behind him, cradling his head in the water.

  ‘No. I have never been to London.’

  He started to kick his legs and Walter let go of his head.

  Later, when we were making our way through the forest towards the station, Walter pointed to a car, a Trabant parked under the pine trees.

  ‘The director has offered to give us a lift home.’

  ‘I would rather catch the train.’

  ‘What’s up, Saul?’

  ‘I’ve had some bad experiences with cars and I can’t see how it would get better in a Trabi.’

  The guard standing on his wooden platform in the tree was now looking at us both. His expression was not aggressive or vigilant. He looked as if he was daydreaming amongst the pines and spruces. Walter poked my ribs. Wolf was making his way towards us, his towel rolled under his arm.

  I had no choice but to travel home with Wolf and Walter. I sat on the back seat and pretended to sleep, but I was aware that Walter had draped his arm over Wolf’s shoulder. Wolf raised his head to glance at me in the rear-view mirror. He was driving with just one hand on the wheel. I kept my eyes on Walter’s arm as if it were a traitor.

  Walter’s lips moved nearer Wolf’s pink ear. He was speaking in German. Not a whisper but a low monotone.

  ‘He has no political affiliations. He doesn’t even vote.’

  Wolf’s laugh was more of a snort. His voice was a low monotone too.

  ‘Your angel sleeping in the back seat writes you careless letters.’

  ‘Yes,’ Walter replied. ‘He doesn’t care about his own life so he doesn’t care about the lives of others.’

  It was true that Walter’s eyes were on me all the time, but I trusted him because his hands were all over me too.

  12

  I could feel that something was wrong with Jennifer and that she wanted to get in touch with me. I tried three times to call her in Britain. The first couple of times I rang her flat in Hamilton Terrace at six in the evening British time. Claudia picked up the phone. When she heard my voice, she slammed the phone down. The second time she as
ked me what I wanted.

  ‘I want Jennifer.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t want you.’ The phone went dead.

  I knew that if Jennifer didn’t want me, Claudia did, but she had to be loyal to Jennifer, who didn’t much like Claudia anyway. She resented the way Claudia signalled her desire for her boyfriend. I could live without Claudia’s desire for me, but life is more exciting to live with desire in it.

  The next time I called at dawn, GDR time. The phone rang for a long time. Jennifer and her flatmates were probably asleep. The sauna would be switched off. The cat would be asleep too. There would be a bowl of seaweed soaking in water in the kitchen. Probably a pot of vegetable curry on the hob from the night before. Empty wine bottles. Chocolate wrappers. Maybe even the flapjacks that Claudia liked to bake, mixing the oats with honey, or sometimes with a thick golden syrup, often with raisins but never with walnuts because she discovered that I don’t like them. Eventually, Saanvi answered.

  She sounded pleased to hear from me, even though Jennifer apparently was not in.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Don’t know. She hasn’t given me her schedule.’

  ‘It’s seven o’clock in the morning your time, Saanvi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who else is in the flat with you?’

  ‘Hey, Saul, have you picked up some tips from the Stasi?’

  I could hear a door creak open in Hamilton Terrace. I was familiar with that door and its broken latch, the door of Jennifer’s bedroom that opened on to the kitchen. It was always blowing open. I was certain that Jennifer had just woken up and was now standing next to Saanvi, so I changed the subject.

  ‘How’s it going with infinity?’

  ‘Good, thanks.’

  ‘Are you still writing your thesis on Georg Cantor?’

  ‘Yep. He had a persecution complex.’

  Someone was filling a kettle with water. I could hear the rustle of paper and Saanvi yawning.

  ‘Listen to this, Saul. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré described Georg Cantor’s work as “a malady, a perverse illness from which someday mathematics will be cured”.’

  It sounded like she was reading from a page of her dissertation.

  ‘He died in a mental clinic in Germany.’

  ‘Whereabouts in Germany, Saanvi?’

  ‘Halle. Between Berlin and Göttingen. Handel was born in Halle too. So was the poet Heine. Are you anywhere near there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It used to produce salt in the tenth century. Cantor was working on a continuum problem just before his breakdown.’

  ‘Saanvi, how is Jennifer?’

  ‘She’s brilliant.’

  I heard a loud click and then two quieter clicks on the phone line as she spoke. It occurred to me that my call to Britain was being monitored. It was likely that someone was listening to this conversation about Georg Cantor and infinity.

  ‘Saanvi, are you still there?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Please tell Jennifer to come to the GDR to see its achievements for herself. Full employment, affordable housing, equal pay for women, free education and universal health care. These are great accomplishments and should never be erased from historic memory.’

  The phone went dead. Saanvi was probably making herself and Jennifer a cup of tea while dividing zero into thirds.

  The sound of a typewriter was going crazy in my head. I heard the keys hammering on to a sheet of thin paper placed in its carriage. It infuriated me, so I added a thought crime to my thoughts for the typewriter to record. Okay, I said to the typewriter, let me help you file your report. The GDR will lose legitimacy with its people due to extreme measures of coercion by authoritarian old men. Men like my father who built a wall between us. The wall was his masculinity. I jumped the wall and landed safely with a thump on the other side, having avoided his dogs, his mines, his guards, his barbed wire and everything else he put in my way to keep me under his thumb.

  My father was sitting on a chair near the telephone.

  ‘You’re dead,’ I whispered.

  He laughed. ‘Not yet.’

  I could smell tinned mackerel on his breath.

  13

  I agreed to accompany Luna to the dacha for the weekend.

  I did not want to be alone with her for a whole day and night, but after forgetting to buy the tin of pineapple, I felt I couldn’t refuse. It seemed that although Luna had many phobias, including peaches and jaguars, she was at ease with blood, because in her job she worked with blood every day. That was why she had noticed the bloodstains on my white jacket in the Abbey Road photograph. While I made tea for myself and coffee for her, she gave me a lecture about blood. Apparently, the way blood works is that like a reliable train it transports all the nutrients and oxygen to our cells and then it also transports all the waste products away from our cells.

  I glanced at the small bag of mushrooms that Walter and I had collected together. There were not that many of them because kissing had become a more enjoyable sport than harvesting fungi. He had hung the bag on a hook on the wall.

  ‘It is certain, Saul,’ Luna said, ‘that you will have around five litres of blood in your body and the white blood cells will be fighting off infections. If you donate just half a litre of blood it can save up to three lives.’

  She had plaited her long hair and pinned it up so that it lay in a serpentine coil on top of her head, and she was very taken with her new black pointed ankle boots in the style of the Beatles’, two sizes too big for her small feet. They were Rainer’s birthday gift to her. It was endearing to be given a lecture on blood by a nurse wearing imitation Beatle boots, her hair arranged in the style of a prima ballerina. She had taken ballet lessons from the age of four from a Russian dancer who was old now but used to run a ballet school in Moscow. Luna did not like tea. I had brought teabags with me to East Berlin, but there was a reproach in the way she took a sip from my cup to taste ‘the English tea’.

  ‘It smells like horse urine. But you drink tea all the time so I suppose you would never forget to pack a box of teabags in your suitcase. May I take some to the neighbour?’

  ‘Have the whole box.’ I pressed it into her hands, slightly aggressively because I was tired of feeling bad about the tinned pineapple. Luna was a lunatic. She screamed at the sight of peaches but loved blood and loved the Beatles. She added five spoons of sugar to her coffee and then knocked it back like a matador.

  ‘If this dacha was made from chocolate,’ she smiled, ‘I could eat the whole house and never put on weight.’ Her mother was always trying to get her to eat more than she needed because of the baby daughter who had not survived.

  ‘But now, Saul, we are going to listen to the Beatles.’ She pointed to a record player I hadn’t noticed the last time I was here with Walter. It was perched on a chair at the end of the room, one side of it held together with beige tape. Luna had hidden her precious album, Abbey Road, in the kitchen drawer. It was wrapped in a towel, and when she unwrapped it, she gazed longingly at the cover and kissed John, Paul, Ringo and George in turn, and then kissed Ringo again. Twice. Three times. Quick tiny kisses.

  ‘Is Ringo your favourite Beatle?’

  ‘Yes. I like his nose. It’s like your nose, Saul!’

  She skipped over to the record player, and very carefully, as if she was holding something infinitely fragile and precious beyond measure, she slid the vinyl out of the cover. It was late afternoon and the sun was shining on Walter’s allotment. So far there were no jaguars prowling around the plaster dwarves and gnomes that seemed popular amongst the dacha owners.

  We listened to the whole of Abbey Road. Luna played ‘Come Together’ twice and ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’ three times. We danced together and worked out some dumb but thrilling hand movements to make each other laugh. Meanwhile we were twisting our hips and shaking our heads in time with Ringo’s drumbeat. I told her it made me feel nostalgic for London. ‘Ah yes
,’ she said, ‘I would like to see London. But most of all I want to go to Liverpool because I want to see Penny Lane for myself.’

  While she was talking she unplaited her hair so that it fell to her waist. A baby jaguar could hide in it with ease. Luna was preparing to do something. She kicked off her black pointed Beatle boots and instructed me to find her a chair which I was to place in the middle of the room. I had to move the pile of old muddy boots I had tripped over last time, also the empty bottle of schnapps that Walter and I had polished off, also the matchbox containing my father’s ashes, which for some reason I had put down on the floor next to the boots and forgotten to take with me. I slipped it into my jacket pocket.

  ‘Look at me, Saul, look!’

  Luna was standing on the chair with her arms stretched out, as if she were flying. She took a breath and, with her arms still outstretched, sang ‘Penny Lane’ from start to finish. She had a strong, high voice, and because she was singing the English words in a German accent, it was even more moving. When she sang one of the lines in German, her translation did not work that well.

  ‘Die schöne Krankenschwester verkauft Mohnblüten von ihrem Tablett.’

  I think it went something like: The beautiful nurse is selling blossoms of poppies from her tray. I did not tell Luna that a remembrance poppy was made from paper and that the poppies in the tray the nurse was holding symbolized the blood shed by wounded and dying soldiers on the fields of Flanders. While she was singing, I heard something growling. It wasn’t nearby, it was far away, but I heard it all the same. It made me shiver while she sang. Luna jumped off the chair and bowed, her arms at her side, while I applauded.