by Deborah Levy
I watched the crowd looking at the photographs, while I, the trespasser, uninvited, also gazed at my younger self sleeping in that flat on Hamilton Terrace, as represented by Jennifer, who had forbidden me to describe her.
I was very calm. I was waiting to be recognized. But no one spoke to me. No one said, ‘Is that you?’
At one point I took three glasses of champagne from a silver tray and drank all of them in five seconds. No one noticed I was there. After a while I walked away from the crowd and took refuge in the men’s bathroom. While I was sitting on the toilet with my jeans around my knees, a biro fell out of my pocket. I picked it up and wrote on the toilet wall in tiny letters. When I gazed at the words I realized I was drunk.
a man in pieces wox hare
I was staggering when I made my way back into the exhibition. No one so much as glanced at the drunk spectre haunting it. I had already knocked back two pints of Guinness in an Irish pub near the gallery before I arrived. To be so insignificant and yet to be the subject of Jennifer’s show was hard to take. At the same time, I did not understand what kind of significance I was after. I did not want to be the man carrying her bag. If I was merely an artist’s model, why would I expect to be acknowledged, even to be praised or publicly thanked? Yet we had been lovers. We were intimately and tragically connected to each other. Why was I here alone? That is what Jack had asked me. ‘Why would you go alone?’ He had offered his support and I had rejected it. At least he could not see me now, uninvited, envious and enraged. I was all over the walls but my name was not on the guest list.
And then she saw me. Everything became slow and weird. I could feel her heartbeat and I knew she could feel mine. In her white dress she walked towards me. The crowds parted as she made her way to where I was standing. She was mortal and I was mortal and Isaac was mortal (oh God) but her art was immortal and filled every wall in the room. I knew that she considered art itself to be bigger than myself and bigger than herself, but I was not that interested in art. Now she was facing me, everything went quiet and queasy and still. I could hear her inhaling and exhaling and I saw her (again) standing on the doorstep having just pushed me out of her flat, her camera in her hands. So long, Saul. You’ll always be my muse.
All my body was trembling.
‘Hello, Saul. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m already here, Jennifer.’ I pointed to the photographs on the wall.
I looked up and saw another image. It was the photograph of myself crossing Abbey Road when I was twenty-eight.
‘That’s Luna’s photo.’
‘Well, you might have given a copy to Luna but I took the photograph.’ She laughed in my face. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I carried a ladder for a mile to Abbey Road to take it.’
The female curator who had made the speech suddenly appeared at her side.
She was Jennifer’s protector, her guard dog. I suppose there was a lot of money at stake in the photographs.
She placed her hand on Jennifer’s arm and invited me to look again at the walls. This time I noticed there were other photographs.
So many of them.
Jennifer standing in profile, naked and pregnant in the doorway of the clapboard house; Isaac sitting in the sand of the bay at Wellfleet, burying his small foot in the sand; Isaac sleeping in the shadow of his mother taking the photograph, as if he had returned to her womb; the new but ancient fists of our son raised to his ears in a rage; the cherry tree in the garden with its abundant blossom, and, underneath it, a toy wooden train; a cello standing abandoned on a sundeck; a tiny shoe decorated with seashells from Wellfleet Bay, and when I looked more closely, I saw the shells made the first letter of Isaac’s name, I, and then the same I written with stones on the sand of the beach. The tide had come in and the I was slipping into the sea; another I drawn with a stick on the sand slopes of Marconi Beach, a single vowel that was being pecked at by a gull, as if it sensed a worm lurked under the sand on which the I was written.
Jennifer Moreau gestured to the walls.
‘It’s not about you. It’s about me.’
13
Wolfgang seemed agitated and excited. His damaged eyelid was quivering. He wore a cologne that smelled of leather – perhaps the marbled doeskin leather seats of his now-extinct Jaguar.
‘I own that photograph,’ he whispered again, in his posh, strained voice.
‘It is one of my most loved acquisitions.’
‘She never asked me.’ I could feel some sort of physical pain returning to the whole of my body. ‘She rejected me all the time but she wanted to possess me.’
He waited patiently while the Irish nurse administered my morphine.
‘I saw you before I saw you on Abbey Road.’ Wolfgang touched his throat with the hand that was not in plaster. ‘I own a Jennifer Moreau.’
I sipped the morphine gratefully in my new private room while the nurse pretended to stare at the wall. I knew she was watching me all the same, like the woman who gave a cauliflower to Walter on the day I arrived in the GDR. She too had been staring elsewhere while watching me intensely.
‘I hear I’m going home in a week?’
She nodded absently.
Wolfgang had become increasingly nervous. He paced around the room in his shiny banker’s shoes, sighing and grinding his teeth.
‘Wolf, can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes, Soorl.’
‘Have you and I ever planted tomatoes together?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not the gardening type.’
‘I don’t think he is the gardening type either.’
‘Who is “he”?’
‘I don’t know. He’s staying away. Keeping his distance.’
The physical pain had disappeared with the morphine. I was crying anyway.
Wolfgang stepped forward with another question.
‘Do you have family?’
‘Yes. A brother.’
He seemed agitated to hear this news. It occurred to me that he thought I might be dying. I wiped my eyes with the sheet. Wolfgang offered me his handkerchief again, but I refused to take it. After a while, I explained that my brother was my next of kin.
‘He’s a thug,’ I said. ‘He will come after your houses and your shares and all your acquisitions.’
I did not tell him that my father had raised my brother and myself in the spirit of socialism. We were to be highly principled and never exploit anyone to get rich.
Wolfgang raised his head and stared at the ceiling.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that when you crossed the road I saw a moment of despair.’
‘I suppose you did.’
We both knew he had been speaking on his phone when he ran me over. I think he was waiting for me to point this out. He stood in silence, like a wounded silver beast, watching me weep, fearful my family would sue him. He was now trying to barter my despair for my silence. When I finally accepted his handkerchief, I told him it was not in my nature to point the finger. It was the better side of my carelessness. He seemed relieved and told me to keep the handkerchief. No. I didn’t want it. I told him to hang on to his possessions and acquisitions. For a start, I had his Jaguar inside my head. His wing mirror, from which he had glimpsed the man in pieces crossing the road, had shattered. A thousand and one slivers of glass were floating inside my head.
I had gazed at my reflection in his wing mirror and my reflection had fallen into me. It was not just my spleen that preoccupied Rainer. Apparently, I was to be nourished later in the day via some tubes that would be placed in my nostrils. Should I eat one of the sunflowers? It was a question I wanted to ask my friend Jack. He was always hungry, after all, especially after a day spent in the garden. Sometimes I feared that Rainer, as well as the night nurse, did not expect to see me in the morning. Where did they think I would be? Offering my kisses like coins to Jack in return for his labour?
14
I looked into the mirror for the first time since my accident. Fuck off
I hate you, I said to the middle-aged man staring back at me. His hair had been shaved. He was a skull. His eyes a shock of blue in his pale face. He had high cheekbones. A cut on the cheek and on the lip. His eyebrows were silver. Where have you gone, Saul? All that beauty blown to bits. Who were you? What languages do you speak? Are you a son and a brother and a father? Are you an acquisition? How do you get along with your female colleagues? What is the point of them, in your view? What is the point of yourself, in their view? Are you there to do something for them? Or are they there to do something for you? Are they a foil for your ambitions or are you a foil for theirs? In what ways do you thwart, oppose, derail or support each other? Which way do you vote? Are you a good historian? Did you ever play football? Cricket? Ping-pong? Are you curious about other people? Or do you walk on the outer edges of life, indifferent, remote, tormented by the affection human beings seem to feel for each other? Are other men envious of you? Are you loving? Have you ever been loved? Yes, I have been loved and I am loving, I said to the man in the mirror, I am all those things I am I am and I need to know what happened to Walter Müller.
‘You know what happened to Walter Müller.’
Jennifer was reading a book at my side. Her hair had turned blue-black in the light. She was floating like cells under a microscope as she pressed the book against the curve of her breasts. ‘You saw him on your thirtieth birthday.’
15
I am being shaved by a Turkish barber in West Berlin. It is January 1990 and snow is falling. The Wall that once divided the country in two is now being sold in pieces as souvenirs to tourists. The barber throws a towel over my shoulders, tilts my head back, moves a brush of foam over my cheeks and jaw and under my chin. My ears fill with foam, too. He picks up a razor, unscrews the blade and puts in another one, silver and sharp. He places his hand on my head and moves in with the blade, starting somewhere near my ear, moving down my cheeks, tipping my head, steering his blade under my chin, wiping the foam on his wrist. His finger holds my nostrils as he moves to my upper lip. I open my mouth. Walter has not answered my phone calls or letters, nor has his mother, nor his colleagues at the university, so it is a surprise that he has finally made contact with me. The radio is on. The barber grabs my head and pushes it down into a basin. He washes my hair with shampoo and rinses it with the tap shower, pulls my head up, places a towel over it. He massages my forehead. Trims my eyebrows with the help of a comb and scissors. Rubs cream into his palms and moisturizes my face. This is how I prepared for my lunch date with Walter Müller. Even after my shave I still had two hours to spare.
To pass time I walked to the tall building in Mitte to look once again at the copper relief of the astronaut called Man Overcomes Space and Time. He was young, noble and determined. If he set his mind to it he could orbit the earth and trick gravity, yet at the same time he was frozen, fixed in the past. Time was passing very slowly. Time was crawling. The cold air grazed my newly shaved face. I talked to an elderly man eating the soup he had purchased from a wagon parked on the pavement. He told me that he had lived most of his life in the East. Since reunification it was every man for himself. No one cared that his family had lost their jobs. He had no money to travel and could not afford to shop in the well-stocked supermarkets of the West. If he had his way he would build the Wall again, except twelve metres higher. I glanced at my watch. Time had at last staggered forward. I hailed a cab to 58 Kurfürstenstraße, where I had arranged to meet Walter at Café Einstein, an old Viennese coffee house and restaurant, leaving my companion to finish his meat-and-pickled-vegetable soup in the snow.
When Walter eventually walked through the doors of Café Einstein, twenty minutes late, he was wearing the grey overcoat he’d worn to meet me at the station two years previously. His hair was cropped, he was thinner, he was smiling, he was in a hurry. He looked apologetic as he fumbled with his wet gloves. I stood up and he kissed my lips, lightly, airily, as if it were a summer day and snow was not falling. He seemed distracted and refused to sit down.
‘You still have your hair,’ he said in English.
He knew I had booked this table three weeks in advance of our meeting. He was agitated and kept glancing at his watch.
‘Please sit down, Walter. Can I buy you a coffee? A beer? Lunch?’
‘No, nothing at all. I have to go soon.’
I was hurt and disappointed. When the waiter passed our table, I ordered two espressos. Walter finally sat down.
I asked him about life now that the border was open.
‘I miss the parties,’ Walter said. ‘We had a lot of parties in the East. Mostly, life is better.’
He dropped a sugar lump into his coffee and stirred it with the tiny silver teaspoon for a long time. The spoon scratched against the porcelain as he stirred, on and on. The astronaut on the statue in Mitte would have made it from Jupiter to Mars by the time Walter eventually lifted the cup to his lips.
He said he had a sense that he was panicking every day. It was hard to make a living as a translator, to pay the new rent and new bills. He put on his spectacles and finally looked more directly into my eyes. The coffee seemed to have perked him up. My subject was communist Eastern Europe but I could not speak the languages. He could speak all the Eastern European languages. He was distinguished and clever but he didn’t think so. I waved to the waiter and ordered Walter another coffee. He told me he liked the sugar lumps in the silver bowl, white and pale gold. I asked him to say that in Polish and Czech.
‘Say what?’
‘The sugar lumps, white and pale gold.’
He found the words as snow fell on the roofs of the taxis parked outside. He told me he didn’t yet know his way around Berlin and had to ask for directions. He looked sadder without his long mousy hair.
I invited him to London to speak to my students about growing up in the GDR.
Walter seemed neither interested nor uninterested. I wondered if he respected me as a historian, or even as a friend. He glanced at the tray a waiter was carrying above his shoulder to a table nearby. It was loaded with schnitzel and potato salad and two glasses of champagne the colour of spring daffodils.
‘I can order that for us,’ I said. ‘Please have lunch with me.’ I reached out for his hand. He was always good at touching back, and he did. This small moment of intimacy made me braver.
‘Tell me what happened, Walter, after we said goodbye in Alexanderplatz.’ I had been tormented for two years by the vision of that van pulling up on the pavement beside him. When he had not responded to my efforts to get in touch with him, I concluded that he must have been pushed into the van by unsmiling grey men. They would have intimidated him with guns and rubber truncheons. He would have been interrogated because I gave Rainer, who was an informer, a substantial sum of money to help him escape. Yet I had not asked Walter if he wanted to leave.
‘The border has opened since we said goodbye,’ he said. ‘But on that afternoon, I believe I ate a very tasty sausage.’
He was not laughing. Walter used to be good at laughing. Such a sexy laugh. When our knees touched under the table, he glanced again at his watch.
‘I don’t think you ate a sausage that afternoon,’ I said. ‘You told me you were scheduled to teach English to men and women who had good careers but who were going to build socialism elsewhere, including Ethiopia.’
‘Correct. It was not a sausage. It was a dumpling.’
I asked him why it had taken him so long to get in touch with me.
‘We had to move to another apartment,’ he said, as if that explained everything.
A woman walked into Café Einstein wheeling a pram, holding the hand of a girl, maybe three years old. She was told to leave the pram outside, at which point Walter stood up and walked over to help her. He scooped up the baby that was asleep in the pram, and then pointed to me. The woman and her daughter made their way to my table. She was in her thirties and had neat, short blond hair, as did her daughter. Their hair was cut in exactly the same
style, short at the back and sides, with a long fringe. Snow was melting on their coats. People were in their way. Chairs had to be moved, tables rearranged, conversations interrupted as she picked up her daughter and swung her over the heads of customers tucking into plates of pork. Her small brown eyes were bright. She had a mole above her lip.
‘Hallo,’ she said, ‘my name is Helga. I am Walter’s wife. And this is our daughter, Hannah.’
I had reserved a table for two. There were now four of us, because Walter was making his way through the crowded restaurant with a baby draped over his shoulder. With the waiter’s help we had to find a bigger table. Walter handed their new child to Helga and went off to hang up their coats. They were a family. His wife was wearing a polo-neck jumper, jeans and trainers. The women dining in Einstein wore cashmere cardigans and leather boots.
‘This is our son, Karl Thomas,’ she said, gesturing to Hannah to sit on the chair next to her.
‘I’m Saul,’ I said to Walter’s daughter. ‘How old is the baby?’
Hannah told me in German that he was seven months.
When Walter returned I ordered three beers and a hot chocolate for the child. Karl Thomas sucked his fingers as Helga passed him back to Walter. Hannah took off her gloves. Walter was preoccupied with the top three buttons on the baby’s snowsuit. Helga searched in her bag, looking for a toy for Hannah. It was all quite boring. They were discussing feeding Karl Thomas. Walter was now using a napkin to clean the teat on a bottle of milk. His hands were gentle as he coaxed the teat into the lips of his son. Hannah threw the cutlery on to the floor. Helga calmly told her to pick it up. Her daughter refused. It was dull to be there with them all. Helga shouted at her and Hannah started to cry. Helga found a box of crayons and paper in her bag and suggested her daughter sit on her lap. Hannah shook her head and crawled under the table. All conversation had stopped. It was as if the family were an organism, each part depending on the other part to survive the next two minutes. They did not seem bored or happy or unhappy. Helga had now persuaded her daughter to come out from under the table. This small triumph seemed to please them all.
