by Deborah Levy
‘I apologize,’ he said, ‘but you stepped on to the crossing and I slowed down but then you changed your mind and then you stepped right in front of my car.’
I smiled at his careful and long-winded recollection of history told from his point of view.
‘I’m all right, no problem.’
A catalogue for an exhibition of Jennifer Moreau’s photographs had fallen out of my leather sling bag and, embarrassingly, so had a packet of condoms. I saw the driver was shocked; even his eyelids were quivering. He gazed at my right hand as blood dripped through my fingers. I sucked them while he watched me, clearly distressed, and then he asked if I needed a lift somewhere, or could he take me to a chemist? When I did not answer he asked for my name.
‘It’s Saul,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s just a small cut. I have thin skin. I always bleed a lot, it’s nothing.’
When I looked up I saw he was shaking, his knees were trembling.
I asked the driver for his name.
‘Wolfgang,’ he said quickly, as if he didn’t want me to know.
He was holding his left arm with his right arm and his weird quivering eyes were crying blood. I wanted him to go away.
‘My wing mirror is smashed,’ he said. ‘I bought it in Milan.’
He was moaning and seemed to be in pain.
‘Can you tell me where you live? How old are you?’
When I told him I was twenty-eight he didn’t believe me. I realized there was glass everywhere and that some of it was inside my head. I had gazed at my reflection in the wing mirror of his car and my reflection had fallen into me.
I was lying on the road. A mobile phone lay next to my hand. A male voice inside it was speaking angry and insulting words.
Fuck off I hate you don’t come home.
My shoes were scattered on the road, too. Blue lights were flashing in my eyes. The man who was crying tears of blood told me it was an ambulance. As I was lifted on to a stretcher by two paramedics, I heard Luna’s voice in my head. ‘It is certain, Saul, that you have more than a gallon of blood in your body and the white blood cells will be fighting off infections.’
2
My father was eating a sandwich near my head. He tore off a piece of bread and rolled it into a ball.
‘You’re dead.’
‘Not yet. It’s you who’s nearly dead.’
I could smell tinned mackerel on his breath.
‘Where’s your hawk?’
‘Arthritis. Can’t move my arm. I walk with a Zimmer now but I left it at home.’
‘Are you Mrs Stechler?’
‘I’m a mister, son, not a missus.’
I remembered that I was writing a paper on Stalin. His father, Beso, was a maniac. When Beso was young he was handsome and debonair. He could speak Russian, Turkish, Armenian and Georgian. When he died, aged fifty-five, he was buried in a pauper’s grave. His son changed his name to Stalin, meaning ‘man of steel’, and went on to rule the Soviet Union.
‘I’m in love with a man.’
Beso laughed in the Georgian manner. I waited for him to call my brother over to beat me. He was rummaging around for something.
‘I’ve just returned from East Germany, the GDR. People want to travel and to be free.’
My father jabbed his finger somewhere near my face. ‘These discontented intellectuals, capitalists and warmongers from the West should put a sock in it. They have no idea how bad conditions were for workers in the past or how the Russian people suffered. In the GDR no one was homeless, everyone had somewhere to live and no one was starving. That is why the state border had to be protected.’
He took out a plastic bag.
‘It’s your mother’s necklace.’
I could move both my hands. I took the bag from him and brought them up close to my eyes. The pearls had last been touched by Luna’s bloody finger.
‘They cut it off when you were in surgery, but I’ve had it restrung for you. Glass in your inner organs. Sepsis. Ruptured spleen. Internal bleeding. They’ve attached a new silver clasp to the necklace. I would have paid for gold but they said the original was silver.’
‘I wish I had given it to Luna. She liked my pearls.’
‘Who’s Luna?’
‘My lover.’
‘I thought you were in love with a man.’
‘I am.’
I knew Jennifer Moreau was somewhere nearby because I could smell ylang-ylang.
I turned my head to look at her. She was wearing a hat and I could not see her face. I tried to move my hand to touch her hair. I held a strand in my fingers but it was not her hair because it was silver. I decided not to look at Jennifer again, but she could read my mind.
‘You are in London.’ Her voice had changed. It was deeper. She had a slight American accent.
I was not sure whether to believe her, because I could see Rainer walking towards me. He had swapped his khaki jacket for a white doctor’s coat. The traitor had got rid of the guitar and replaced it with a stethoscope. By the time he got to my bed I knew what I wanted to say to him.
‘You are not to be trusted. You live in a brand-new apartment with three bedrooms. You are a Stasi informer.’
‘You might be right,’ he replied, ‘but it’s not very likely.’
‘Rainer is your doctor.’ Jennifer uncrossed her legs and I could smell the sweet ylang-ylang.
‘Listen, Jennifer, don’t say anything to Rainer except goodnight and good morning.’
‘Good morning, Rainer,’ she said in her slightly American accent.
There was a machine near the bed. I was attached to it. Tubes were taped to the back of my hand.
I whispered to Jennifer, without looking at her.
‘Did you get the flowers?’
‘They are here,’ she said, ‘not roses, sunflowers.’
A vase of sunflowers stood on the table next to my bed.
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: I bought them for you.’
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: I bought them for you.’
‘Did you get my message, Jennifer?’
‘What message?’
‘From the careless man who loves you.’
‘That was nearly thirty years ago.’
Rainer had disappeared.
As she leaned her face over my face, I shut my eyes. I was not ready to look at her. Her lips touched my forehead.
‘Jennifer, are you really here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where was I yesterday?’
‘Here.’
‘And the day before?’
Rainer came back. With another Stasi official in a white coat. I had seen him at a party in East Berlin and his name was Heiner. He was discussing the drip in my hand. They both said the same word my father had said. Sepsis.
Rainer disappeared again. Heiner followed him.
‘Jennifer?’
‘Yes, Saul.’
‘I have to tell you something.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I am in love with someone else. I am in deep with a man.’
‘Who?’
‘Walter Müller. I want to spend the rest of my life with him.’
‘That’s old news,’ she said. ‘That was when you were twenty-eight. By the way, I am in love with a man too.’
Someone else was by my bed.
My brother Fat Matt and his pinched-lipped wife. She reminded me that her name was Tessa.
‘I’m glad you’ve come round,’ she said, but I could tell she didn’t mean it.
My brother Matt was leaning over my head.
‘Keep your arms and hands outside the sheets. The tubes get tangled otherwise.’
‘You fucking bastard,’ I whispered to Fat Matt as he leaned in closer. His eyes were so big.
‘I’m sorry about what happened, Saul. You’ve been flat-out.’ A sound of a chair being dragged across a floor. To the edge. Of where I was now. Which was a bed. Next to a machine. I was attached to the machine with tubes. Ma
tt reached for my hand.
I called for Rainer. ‘You’re good at making people disappear. Tell him to leave or you’ll smash his fat face in.’
Rainer advised my brother not to take it personally.
‘He is not entirely with us.’
I shut my eyes. It was the most basic magic to make him go away.
Take it personally, the voice in my head said loudly. It is personal.
When I opened my eyes again Matt was being led out of the room at a pace by his drab wife.
I pointed to my father.
‘And him. He must go too.’
Rainer addressed my father as Mr Adler when he told him I needed to rest.
My head was very heavy when he said my father’s surname so formally. It felt like someone was tapping it from the inside. What does it make you think of? It made me think of the plaited loaf of soft bread my mother baked on Friday mornings. A golden challah with sesame seeds. As a child I would beat the eggs and add the salt, sugar and oil while she poured in the frothing yeast and the flour. After we had left it for a few hours in the warm airing cupboard, we would begin my favourite task, which was to divide the dough into three pieces and plait them. When it was baked I would turn the loaf upside down and tap it to see if it was hollow. My mother made this bread for my father, who pretended not to care. But he did care because after she died he bought a challah every Friday. When I told him I knew how to make challah he said he didn’t care. I saw Rainer leading my old man down the corridor. He had forgotten his walking stick and was limping.
Rainer came back. His stethoscope was somewhere on my chest. My heart. Cold. Cold. Cold Rainer. I asked him if he still read the beat poets.
‘I don’t know who they are.’
‘But you smuggled in their books.’
‘Did I now.’
‘I suppose the authorities let you. They wanted the names of anyone reading them.’
He came up close to my ear.
‘Where are you, Saul?’
‘Germany. East. I swam in Honecker’s personal lake.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Germany East and West are together. The year is 2016. The month is June, the twenty-fourth. Yesterday Britain voted to leave the European Union.’
‘You are despicable, Rainer,’ I said. ‘How old were you when the Stasi recruited you?’
I heard Jennifer coughing nearby.
‘What did they do to Walter? What happened to Luna? Come on, Rainer. Answer my questions.’
‘It’s a good sign,’ Rainer said, ‘to be able to talk in full sentences and to order your family away from your bedside.’
‘I can smell everything. It’s too much. I know you have just eaten an apple, Rainer.’
His hands were on my stomach. He seemed to be attending to a bandage or looking at something under the bandage.
‘You know, I have just eaten something like an apple. A dried apple ring my mother sent me from Dresden.’
‘Gebackene Apfelringe,’ I whispered.
‘Wow,’ Rainer said, ‘you speak German?’
There must have been some sort of bandage on my head as well as my stomach because I could feel the tears slide underneath it.
‘Rainer, I am very frightened for Walter. Will you give him a message for me? He’s a translator. My lover.’
‘I don’t know who Walter is.’
‘You do know. You have been given a passport to visit the West four times a year. You have a new car. Everyone else has to wait fifteen years to get one.’
‘He’s confused.’ My father had returned and was looking for his stick. He was whispering with his mackerel breath, as usual embarrassed by his son’s tears.
‘I buried you in the GDR,’ I whispered to the spectre called Mr Adler.
‘If that is true, son, you will have buried your father alive.’
No one helped him find his stick. It hurt me to see him searching for it.
‘Did you nail me into a coffin?’
‘No, you were in a matchbox.’
My father seemed to have found his stick.
He was muttering something to Rainer about how it was his job to bring his son back to reality and not to comply with his delusions. I could hear him explaining to my doctor, who might also be a Stasi informer, that I was a historian. My subject was communist Eastern Europe and somehow I had transported myself back to the GDR, a trip I had made when I was twenty-eight in the year 1988. Now, nearly thirty years later, while I was lying on my back in University College Hospital, I seemed to have gone back in time to that trip to the GDR in my youth. My father was always trying to bring me back to reality but I never much liked it there in the first place. I heard him breathing and grinding his teeth.
Once again, Rainer tactfully tried to get him to leave.
‘We need Saul to be calm,’ I heard him say.
‘Are you banning me from seeing my own son?’
Rainer told him there were strict hospital visiting times.
‘Piss off, doctor, your trains might run on time but we all know where they were going.’
‘Yes,’ Rainer said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t believe in war myself.’
I started to like Rainer. Though I tried not to because of his treachery.
I began to mull over the problem of liking people we are not supposed to like, yet find ourselves becoming fond of them. A nurse was rubbing something cold into my arm. A needle pricked my skin. I opened my eyes. There was a woman visiting the patient in the bed next to me. She was holding a baby.
It hurt me to look at her child. I wanted her to take the baby away. Jennifer, who was close by, was looking at the baby too.
I called for Rainer. He had disappeared.
‘What do you want?’ Jennifer asked me.
‘Take that baby away.’
‘We can’t do that,’ she replied. ‘But one day we must talk about America.’
I still couldn’t look at her.
‘What happened in America?’
She was silent.
‘How old are you, Jennifer?’
‘Fifty-one.’
‘How old am I?’
‘Fifty-six.’
‘Where have we gone?’
‘I am here. Where are you?’
‘Alexanderplatz. Near the World Clock. I am standing with Walter.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘You never asked me.’
‘Asked you about what, Saul?’
‘If I minded.’
‘Minded what?’
‘Where’s Rainer?’
‘You’re not his only patient, you know.’
‘I need to know what happened to Luna.’
‘Who is Luna?’
‘Walter’s sister.’
‘Here’s Rainer.’ She waved to the doctor and walked towards him. I saw his hand touch the back of her hand. I did not believe I was fifty-six. But I could believe Jennifer was fifty-one, even though I had not looked at her face. She was plumper and wealthier, her clothes, her shoes. The man lying in the bed next to me had asked for her autograph. She signed the plaster cast on his left leg as if she were famous, but that might have been something people do on plaster casts anyway. Except that when she drew a goat or something like that with her pen, he said he would have to keep the cast after they cut it off because her drawing was worth more than his flat. Her dress was made from something flimsy with tiny polka dots all over it, a dress that younger Jennifer would never have worn.
Later he showed me what she had written.
Get a leg over
J. M.
‘How do you know Jennifer Moreau?’
‘She’s my girlfriend.’
He laughed and then stopped himself.
‘There’s a man who stands by your bed at night. He says his name is Wolfgang. He wants to talk to you but you’re always asleep when he arrives.’
3
In the wakefulness of the long nights in hospital with its
nocturnal moaning and whispering, I thought about the astronaut on the tall building in East Berlin, whirling through space and time with the planets and the birds.
Yet here on the Euston Road, I was not in GDR time and space, I was floating somewhere above America. I could hear the sound of waves crashing on the sand slopes of a beach called Marconi while office workers in London drank beer in pubs and film executives filled the local tapas bars. As patients snored or cried out for help, an ocean flowed through the twilit ward of the hospital. Outside, a truck pulled up to collect the rubbish bags off the London streets while I stood alone on Marconi Beach. There were seals in that ocean. A lighthouse nearby. It was an anguished space. I wanted to move elsewhere, with the gulls and the planets. And I did move on, but not very far, perhaps just a few miles down the coast. There are ponds and clapboard houses and shacks selling lobster. Jennifer is walking down a sandy path by the salt marshlands near a coastal place called Wellfleet, New England. She is lying on her stomach amongst the tall reeds and she is inconsolable. At sunrise Jennifer leans and weeps against the door of a clapboard house. I know she has used up all her strength on whatever it is that lies behind the door. There is a cherry tree in the garden. When the wind blows, its blossom falls through the universe like pink rain.
I was aware that sometimes in the afternoon, the man who ran me over was standing by my bed, a spectre of judgement and blame. I recognized his weird quivering eyes. I knew he was ashamed and that it was something to do with the object I had found on the road.
‘Go away, Wolfgang,’ I whispered. ‘Make sure your brakes work this time.’
He was in the mood for talking, even though I was not available to him. He even made small talk about Christmas. He told me his parents came from Austria, a place called Spitz in the district of Wachau, a ninety-minute drive from Vienna airport. The wine-producing district. Grapevines. The Danube. Small villages. A monastery. He and his husband bought all their Christmas decorations from Spitz, including the chocolate liqueurs filled with kirsch to hang on their tree. They had found a straw goat at a fair and decorated it with grapes, which would dry into raisins. He had an adopted brother who was from Bucharest but now lived in Zurich.
