The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

  ‘To Hamilton Terrace?’

  ‘No. That’s where I lived when I was a student.’

  I shuddered. ‘We have lost so much time, Jennifer.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’ She turned another page.

  ‘Where were you in America?’

  ‘You know where.’

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘No. That was later.’

  ‘You said we.’

  ‘Yes. I was in Cape Cod with our son.’

  ‘You were so lovely, Jennifer. You wore sandals made from car tyres. And a kimono with a dragon embroidered on the back.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember the sandals and that kimono. And you too, Saul. Your long black hair and olive skin and cheekbones and lips. We had such an appetite for each other.’

  I reached for her new older hand with my new older hand.

  ‘But tell me, Jennifer, why did you turn me down when I asked you to marry me? Is it because you knew I was attracted to men?’

  ‘No. Not at all. I knew you fancied me too.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘You know why.’

  9

  When I asked Jennifer to marry me, I was looking through the bedroom door, which had somehow opened of its own accord while we were making love.

  Her flatmate Claudia had just come out of the sauna to turn off the boiling kettle in the kitchen. She was naked apart from a pink towel wrapped around her head. Her stomach was flat and tanned. I was looking at her when I asked Jennifer to marry me. I wanted to keep all my options open, even as the words I was saying were supposed to close them. Jennifer wanted to keep her options open, too. There was a letter, an official-looking invitation to America, folded between the pages of her passport. She knew the worth of the art she was making for her graduation show and that it would blow her away from Britain and away from me. Had I wanted to stop her career from its immense lift-off when she was so young? Had I wanted to keep her chained to my side with my marriage proposal? Maybe, but why had I made sure she could see me looking at Claudia? I’d wanted to tell her that I had eyes, too. Jennifer was always looking at me through the lens of her camera. I often woke up with my lips pressed against her knees because she was lying at an odd angle, her camera in her hands. There were times I would pretend to sleep and then suddenly open my eyes to catch her out. Jennifer was making a career from looking. At me.

  ‘Not just at you,’ older Jennifer said, ‘I was mostly looking at my friend, Saanvi. It was my photos of her that got me the residency in America. Why not ask me what kind of camera I was using in those days?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I worked with a Leica M2, the very best at the time. It belonged to my father.’

  ‘Why are you here, with me, Jennifer?’

  ‘Why do you think, Saul?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘You do know.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘Because you are the father of my son. Isaac died in America when he was four.’

  ‘I know. I know he died. How did it happen?’

  ‘No one knew he had meningitis. Not the doctor. Not me. It happened very quickly. We buried our son together.’

  ‘Oh, Jennifer. Come closer.’

  I held her hand. And I kissed it. And then I placed her hand under my shirt on my chest with my hand over hers. ‘Really,’ I said, ‘I had no idea how to be the man you wanted me to be. I have only just started to feel things and I don’t even know what year I am in.’ I entwined my new older fingers through her new older fingers. We could both feel my heartbeat going berserk. We stayed like that for the whole night, her hand on my chest near my heart, my hand on top of hers, her silver hair falling over my face. It was so very comforting not to be left alone at night with the spectres.

  ‘You took our son to America,’ I was suddenly shouting. ‘You more or less kidnapped my son.’

  The sun was rising over the Euston Road. We could both see strips of orange sky through the blinds.

  ‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau’ – my voice was surprisingly loud: ‘I have not forgiven you.’

  ‘I have not forgiven you either, Saul Adler.’

  Our hands were still entwined. Speaking for myself, I could have died right then.

  ‘I have no memory of Isaac. I can’t see his face.’

  ‘He will come back.’

  ‘I don’t think I could bear that.’

  ‘You will survive.’

  I looked into her eyes. For a long time. I saw that she had survived, but she was different.

  ‘Tell me about ylang-ylang.’

  ‘It’s a flower,’ she said, ‘and a kind of antidepressant and an aphrodisiac. It grows in the rainforests of Indonesia and Java.’

  We must have both slept for a while. It’s true that my son’s face came back to me. I described him to her and she said, ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right. Shall we carry on talking about America?’

  I nodded with my new old head that was nearly sixty.

  ‘You promise you won’t walk away?’

  ‘I promise,’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t be fair because you can’t walk away.’

  10

  Jennifer is twenty-eight and I am thirty-three. Our son is sick. The year is 1993. He has a few days of life left in him, but we do not yet know this. I have taken the first flight to Boston and then a ferry. A car is waiting for me in Provincetown harbour. I have been holding my sick son in a room in the clapboard house in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, for five hours. It is late afternoon and Jennifer suggests I get some fresh air in the garden. I am lying under a cherry tree in the garden of the house in Cape Cod. In the garden next door is a woman, maybe twenty-six. She is playing her cello on the wooden deck. The same piece of music over and over again. It is a pleasure to listen to her attempt to learn the language of that music. It is humming with life and hope. The woman looks up from her giant instrument, the bow in her hand, her back very straight and poised, and sees me lying under the tree. I wave, a very limp wave. I tell her I’m going to swim in the bay. The tide is in. Does she want to swim with me?

  Yes, she does. She does want to swim with me. She stands up, her hand lightly resting on her cello, which looks lonely from the sudden absence of her body.

  I wait for her to appear again, not believing she will come back, but she does. Her copper hair is shining in the sun, her green eyes are glittering, she seems to be phosphorescent, like a firefly or moss that can glow in the darkness of the night. I am delirious with exhaustion and I am frightened. No one seems to know what is wrong with my son. She walks through the hedge that has an arch carved into it, and when she enters our part of the garden, she stops and flinches. I turn around to where she is looking. Jennifer is standing behind me under the cherry tree. A wind is up. The blossom falls like pink rain.

  ‘Yes,’ older Jennifer said. ‘I watched you both head off to the bay.’

  ‘I was out of my mind,’ I whispered from my bed in the Euston Road.

  The phosphorescent, copper-haired woman took my hand and we waded into the shallow bay with its little crabs and floating weeds. She was telling me all about herself. I said nothing at all. I was pleased not to talk about my sick son. She was on vacation and renting the house next door. She was reading literature at Harvard and she played her cello in an orchestra. Her main task that summer was to learn the music I had heard her practising in the garden. In a few weeks’ time she would be playing in a concert in Boston. She was open-minded and interesting and appreciated the attention and the company of the man who was listening to her. He had all the time in the world to be with her, it seemed, to swim and collect shells and frolic in the warm shallow water. The sun shone on her bright copper hair. We lay on our stomachs in the water, our shoulders touching, looking out at the sand slopes and white reeds and families unpacking picnics. It was as if she were a demonic python with her glittering eyes and long tanned legs, her soft hands deceptively strong, reaching out to me under the big
American sky. She had just arrived in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, and knew nothing about my son, Isaac, who was unwell and would not survive, though I did not know that then. I liked it that she lived in another sort of reality, of books and music and the first few days of a vacation and a concert to look forward to in the future.

  It was so different from my own reality, because soon, very soon, we would be performing the rituals of our son’s death.

  ‘No,’ older Jennifer said, sitting by my side, ‘no, she was not the python, don’t make her the thing that you were. You were the snake in the reeds. You walked away when I most needed you.’

  ‘You were anti-need,’ I said coldly. ‘That was your thing, you didn’t need me.’

  ‘There was no point in depending on you.’ She pulled her hand away from mine. ‘You were anti-dependency right from the start.’

  ‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: that is why you were attracted to me in the first place.’

  Jennifer flicked a strand of her silver hair over her shoulder. In the dark I could see her beauty, her poise and grace.

  ‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: I had a baby when I was twenty-four. Isaac was with me every day while I worked. We were happy. We loved each other. Many other people loved him too. He died in my arms and you were ten minutes away, but you were not there.’

  Her phone was beeping. ‘Don’t take that call’: I was steely now. ‘We are just beginning. We are on to something interesting.’

  I snatched the beeping phone from her hand.

  ‘You took our son to America.’ I was shouting again.

  She stood up and started to walk away. The door was open and I could see her making her way through the long, eerie corridor towards the exit. Her heels clattered across the floor. ‘You more or less kidnapped my son,’ I shouted through the door. ‘We should be together, you know we should.’

  Jennifer kept on walking.

  ‘We are attached.’ I was surprised at the volume of my voice.

  She turned around and suddenly ran back towards me with such force and purpose I was terrified.

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘know nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing about me and nothing about you.’

  She was sobbing as she leaned forward and slapped my hand until her phone fell to the floor. When she stooped down to pick it up, I knew in the moment of drifting off, which I often do when things get overwhelming, that Wolfgang had paid for my private room. It was something to do with the phone.

  Rainer appeared from wherever he lived in the walls of the hospital. He pulled Jennifer away from my bed and walked her out of my world. She was speaking on the phone in the eerie light of the corridor. I heard her bracelets jangling on her arm as she spoke. She sounded like she was speaking to a teenage child.

  ‘If you’ve lost your bank card, you need to go to the bank with your passport and draw out some cash.’

  After I had frolicked in the bay with the copper-haired woman, she told me about the music she was learning for her concert. It turned out to be a Scottish folk song. She was practising Nina Simone’s version of that song to accompany the pianist on her cello. She sang it to me on the way back through the reeds. The first line was ‘Black is the colour of my true love’s hair.’ That day, when I betrayed Jennifer under the cherry tree, I had discovered a terrible cruelty within myself. I glanced at her leaning against the wall in the corridor, her bracelets glittering on her arm.

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ Jennifer said quietly into her phone. ‘Ask your father to give you some money until you sort it out.’

  11

  Wolfgang was still waiting to speak to me. I knew I had to make myself available to him as he sighed behind the vase of sunflowers. His mane of silver wolfish hair would have freaked out Luna. He was standing by my bed, a camel coat draped over his shoulders, his eyelids quivering as he mouthed my name.

  Soorl. Soorl. Soorl.

  He was nervous and his vulnerability made me bolder.

  ‘Yes, we have met before, Wolfgang. You were swimming in Erich Honecker’s lake.’

  I knew he preferred to swim on his back and that he was exhausted from inventing phenomenology, along with Husserl and Heidegger.

  ‘Have you retired from your directorship of the university?’

  ‘I have never been director of a university. I manage a number of hedge funds.’

  Silence and sighing from Wolfgang.

  His Jaguar had crashed into my head on Abbey Road and travelled with me to East Berlin, but it was already in Luna’s head. That was where the regime wanted her jaguar to be. Inside her head. At night it threatened to drag her off and punish her for her thoughts. I could feel Luna’s breath very close to me: she was somewhere nearby. I wanted to comfort her because I thought I knew how to, but she was not listening. She wanted to swap the Spree for the Mersey and would do anything to get there. Bang. I love you. Rock and roll. You are my boyfriend now. If only you could dance too, she had said, we could try a pas de deux, which means ‘steps for two’. With the support of someone else helping with the lifts, she would be able to accomplish more than on her own.

  I had not been listening.

  Wolfgang was fumbling with his right hand in his coat pocket. He found what he was looking for. It was a handkerchief. A blue-and-white checked handkerchief folded into a neat square. He passed it to me, but I don’t know why. He has a secret, I whispered to Luna, who was definitely nearby. I wiped my eyes with his handkerchief while he gathered his thoughts. They were heavy thoughts. So heavy, he lowered his silver head.

  ‘But, Soorl.’

  Where was the nurse with my morphine?

  He raised his head.

  ‘I want to talk about how you crossed the road. This is not to excuse myself or to chastise you. It is something else.’

  I gave him back the handkerchief. After a while he put it away, an agonizingly slow procedure. He glanced at his shoes and then he lifted his head and looked at me.

  ‘Yes, Wolfgang, you are going to tell me I was careless.’

  I could see his eyes shining in the dark.

  ‘No. It was a very deliberate action on your part. You were not careless at all. In fact you were very focused on getting yourself run over that day.’

  I told him, coldly, that his insurance would cover the cost of the damage to his car.

  ‘But what about damage to myself?’

  He lifted his right arm to point to his left arm under the coat that was draped over his shoulders.

  It was covered in a plaster cast, right up to the shoulder. He leaned forward so I could look more closely. His eyes were quivering because there was a small cut at the edge of one of his upper eyelids that had been stitched, and there were other scars, raw and recent.

  I remembered Walter stretching out Wolf’s arms in the lake. The way Wolf drove us home, with only one hand on the steering wheel, both of them whispering while I pretended to sleep.

  He doesn’t care about his own life so he doesn’t care about the lives of others.

  Wolfgang was standing very still on the polished floor of my private hospital room.

  I could still hear Jennifer talking on her phone. Black is the colour of my true love’s hair. She must have heard that song as I walked back to the clapboard house.

  ‘The way you crossed the road. You nearly succeeded. You have survived because someone donated his blood to you.’

  The fatal blush was beginning to welt into my body. I was blushing with the help of adrenaline and a stranger’s blood. The dilating veins in my cheeks were telling Wolfgang that I was mortified. I tried to breathe. There was a coppery taste in my mouth. My mother’s accident and my accident were still blurred in my mind, as was Isaac’s death, which I still could not feel. I wanted to die of shame but everyone insisted on keeping me alive. I had to live. I had to live this moment now with Wolfgang. I don’t think I’d had a normal life since Isaac’s death, or since my meeting with Walter Müller and his family. When I crossed the road that day,
I was a man in pieces.

  I must have said this out loud.

  ‘I was a man in pieces.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wolfgang said, ‘I own that photograph.’

  12

  Three years after Isaac died and Jennifer and I had truly separated, I made the pilgrimage to see Jennifer’s first solo exhibition at a gallery in Chelsea, New York. It was the opening night and I had not been invited. When Jack sent me a newspaper cutting about the show, I decided to gatecrash the private view. He offered to come with me, but I declined his company.

  My excuse was that if Jennifer Moreau and I murdered each other, it was best he did not appear to be my accomplice.

  Jennifer wore a long white dress. She was thirty-one and I was thirty-six. My hair was still black and her hair was now silver. She was happy that night. Jennifer stood to the right of the largest black-and-white photograph of myself, age twenty-eight. He took up the whole wall. His lips were slightly parted. His face was impassive, cold, detached. The image stopped at his narrow waist and the start of his pubic hair. A triptych on the left wall was titled A Man in Pieces. His armpits, nipples, fingers, penis, feet, lips, ears. Floating in space and time. From my place at the back of the gallery, I listened to Jennifer speak. She never once mentioned my name or exposed me as the subject of her visual interrogation. The man in pieces had dead eyes. The curator made a speech too. Something about the blurring of the triptych, the head shot in profile, the long exposure and the shutter speed and placing a subject next to the edge of the page so the eye is drawn to it. Her words were a blur to me as well. Something about loneliness, love, youth, beauty. When Jennifer was a student working with oil paint she was always searching for a studio with enough light. After she took up her camera she practically lived in the dark room. It was there she discovered that developing a photograph was similar to being a painter.

  There is a spectre inside every photograph.

  Various fashionably dressed women and men gathered around her. A tall man lingered nearby. He was dressed entirely in black. Every now and again he whispered in her ear or brought her a glass of champagne. I noticed that he was carrying her bag. When she was steered to the far end of the gallery and he stood stranded at the other end, he lifted up his glass to acknowledge her wave. I was glad not to be him.