by Deborah Levy
I raised my head from the pillows. ‘You have daughters, Jennifer?’
‘Yes. They are both at university.’
My eyes were open and hers were closed, her eyelashes mascaraed blue.
‘You know, Saul, you might be a good father.’ Suddenly we were kissing. Deep kissing. In that kiss I tried to beam all my love into her.
‘You are blooming,’ I said to her. ‘Your hair and eyes are shining and your breasts have become heavier.’ When I placed my hand on Jennifer’s stomach, she pushed it away.
‘I will be a good father,’ I whispered in her cold ear.
‘Yes. But you would be a terrible husband.’
‘We don’t have to get married.’
‘You’re already a terrible boyfriend.’
When I told her I wanted to be with her when the baby was born, she suddenly raised her hand.
‘I grew up without a father,’ she said. ‘What’s it like to have one around?’
‘Bad,’ I replied.
I must have spoken that word out loud, ‘bad’, because I heard older Jennifer whisper in French to whoever else was by her side, ‘He is still with us, but was he ever with us?’
I was very much with her after we buried Isaac, when we took off our swimming gear away from the crowds on the shores of that pond in Cape Cod. Both of us naked, frail, treading water at different ends of the longest pond. And then we made our way towards each other, which is when we saw the turtle flick between our legs. At last we touched, head to head, our arms around each other, toes sinking in the sand, sun blasting down on our shoulders. I gazed across the water to the shore. Someone was waving at Jennifer as he stood under a big New England tree. He was tall and he was holding a towel in his hands. She started to swim back to him, at first slowly, as if every movement of her arms and legs pained her, and then she picked up speed, kicking the water into a froth as she swam towards where he was waiting for her with the towel held out in his hands. We both knew the turtle that could snap at her legs was also swimming for its life somewhere nearby.
19
Matt returned alone, without his wife, who had come on her secret mission to torment me with reality. He brought no gifts. He had come straight from work so it must have been around seven at night. He was wearing a blue boiler suit. I knew he had been sure to arrive at a time when he knew Rainer’s shift had ended. He had come to find me and harm me. The tips of his boots were made from lead. He carried a bag of tools. He smelled of sweat and bricks. His forehead was pink. Maybe burned from the sun, because I had begun to understand that it was summer. His big fingers were smeared with sooty dust.
I made a sign with my hands to ward him off.
He moved two steps backwards.
‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He lifted his big hands and placed them over his pink face. Then he moved to a nearby sink and washed his hands with a few drops from the antibacterial soap dispenser.
‘Speak to me from the sink. Don’t come any closer. Stand there.’
He nodded.
‘Put your big fists in the pockets of your boiler suit.’
He placed his hands, still wet from the water, in his pockets.
‘Dad died last night, Saul.’
I started to drift off but only for three seconds. I opened my eyes and Matt was still standing where I had told him to stand, by the sink. His bag of tools was by his feet.
‘The neighbour who brings him the newspaper found him this morning.’
He closed his brutal blue eyes.
We were both silent for about forty years.
‘The grandchildren are upset,’ he said.
‘What grandchildren?’
‘My sons.’
He glanced at his watch. His family were waiting for him to come home.
‘Did they like their grandfather?’
‘Oh yes.’
We were silent for another fifteen years.
‘He made all the furniture in their room. The bunk beds. He made Isaac a wooden train.’
A few more decades passed between us. I was somewhere in a university town with spires and old stone buildings. I was lying in a punt on the River Cam, reading a book. It was a life I never thought I deserved. Was I allowed to want it? I was eating supper at a long wooden table in my college, wearing my black undergraduate gown. The students before me had gone on to become eminent philosophers, composers, physicists, priests, bishops, industrialists, deans, biochemists, political theorists, cricketers. What was I aiming for? What did I want? What did I deserve? I was in a tutorial in a study overlooking a square of green grass, talking about the book I had not read. My tutor stared out of the window. I was neither stupid nor brilliant, but my physical beauty gave me some gravitas. My friend Anthony’s father had come to visit him. He was a banker and a Tory. My father was a builder and a communist. We got on all right. I had come from another world, but I did not want to find my way home. Anthony’s father wanted to know where I went to school. And where my brother went to school. And where my father went to school. ‘We were all educated at Eton,’ I told him solemnly, while Anthony, who kept his signet ring in a box of cocaine under his bed, guffawed into his soft, white hands. I was asked to choose a bottle of wine from the menu. They both knew that I knew nothing about wine because it was likely my family drank beer. We ate a plate of guts in a posh restaurant and talked about the weather and traffic. The last time I had returned home to Bethnal Green we talked about the Toxteth riots in Liverpool.
‘Doves,’ Matt said. ‘I will let off some doves for Dad.’
‘He preferred his hawk.’
‘Doves,’ he said again.
‘A dove is a small pigeon which can be disembowelled by a hawk.’
It was the sort of thing I used to say to Anthony, but it was lost on Matt.
A few months passed between us.
When I opened my eyes, Matt was still by my bed.
I pointed to the box of fudge my father had left on the table.
Matt opened the box. He waved a square past my lips.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It will send me mad.’
‘You’re already mad. Can’t see that a bit of fudge will make any difference.’
I closed my eyes and tried to touch my black hair. I couldn’t find it so I touched my right earlobe instead.
A day passed between us. Our father had died sometime in that day. Matt was still there but he was putting on his jacket.
‘Saul. I am very sorry for everything.’
My brother was trying to say something, as usual.
‘I didn’t take our mother passing very well either. I was a freak.’
‘That’s an insult to freaks,’ I hissed, like the freakish swans on the Spree. ‘You mean you were not stable.’
‘That’s it.’
‘I thought I was the mad one.’
‘You were the clever, good-looking one,’ he replied. ‘I was the crazy, ugly, stupid one.’
‘That sounds about right.’
Something was wrong. I gazed at my brother’s wet blue eyes. Now that I had spoken those words out loud, it was hard to put them back in again, quietly, sneakily, as if nothing had happened. He was the crazy, ugly, stupid one. That sounds about right. The shiny floor. My brother’s dusty boots.
‘Nothing is right,’ I said to Matt in my head. ‘Our brotherhood is not right.’
‘You’re saying something.’ Matt took a step closer. He listened while I spoke to him. ‘No, you’re singing,’ he said. ‘You’re singing “Penny Lane”.’ I heard a voice come out of my body, a tiny, cracked voice. Everything was loud, except for my voice. The loud clock ticking on the wall of the hospital on the Euston Road. The clock ticking in the dacha in the GDR. Luna standing on the chair in the dacha with her arms stretched out, trying to tell me she was hopeless. The saddest clock ticking in the clapboard house in Cape Cod. The watch on my dead father’s wrist still ticking. I sang to my brother’s wet blue eyes.
After a while he wa
lked back to the basin.
‘Is there something you want me to say for you at the funeral?’
‘I’ll say it for myself. I’m home in a week.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘The night nurse. Rainer confirmed it.’
Matt zipped up his jacket. It seemed to take him a long time and required all his attention. The zip was stuck for about ten years. Some of the grooves were missing.
‘And you,’ I asked, ‘what will you say?’
‘A few words.’
‘Like what?’
The tube of light on the ceiling lit up his big sad face. He looked like a giant bald angel.
‘I will give a bit of history,’ he said. ‘ “Dad, you raised your sons alone. You grew up in East London …”’
‘ “In circumstances that were somewhat reduced,”’ I offered. ‘ “In fact, you grew up so poor, you sold your dog at the market.”’
Matt cracked a smile.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘There was a market in the East End where you could sell your pets if you were that broke.’
I continued from my bed.
‘ “Dad, after the war you carved the flesh off a dead horse and gave the meat to the poor.”’
‘He never did that.’
Matt’s zip was still stuck. He tugged at it while he spoke.
‘ “Dad, you worked every hour. The house was warm in winter. We never wanted for anything. Except our mother. You read Karl Marx when you were fourteen.”’
Matt paused. ‘Can you help me out here? I’ve never read The Communist Manifesto. What did he see in it?’
He plucked a pen from his pocket. A small biro the size of his little finger with the name of a building society written across its side.
I cleared my throat. The sunflowers were wilting in their vase.
‘Marx was just twenty-nine when he wrote The Communist Manifesto with Engels, who was twenty-seven. What were we doing when we were in our late twenties, Matt?’
‘Better not to go there.’ Matt slipped his pen back into his pocket.
And then he was gone. I called out for my brother. Someone was crying in the next ward.
The Irish nurse was running towards the place where the crying was coming from.
20
The crying was coming from inside me. I was sitting on a chair outside the physiotherapy room, getting my breath back. I had just finished my session and discovered I could now walk in a straight line and in zigzags and backwards and in circles and forwards. I had lost my job. I was no longer officially a minor historian. Perhaps I was history itself, flailing around in a number of directions, sometimes all of them at the same time. While I stared at my feet and rested and wept on the chair, I became aware there was another pair of feet nearby. These feet were wearing black sneakers, the laces undone on the right foot. When I looked up I saw my friend Jack standing over me. His hair was silver and he wore it in a bun on top of his head. He was wearing the usual linen jacket over his chinos, his hands in his jacket pockets, a fountain pen clipped to his top pocket. At the same time the tea lady was wheeling a trolley past the row of chairs outside the physiotherapy room. She asked if I wanted tea. I shook my head but Jack intervened.
‘That will be two cups, thank you.’
He peered at the muffins and scones arranged in a pyramid on the trolley.
‘And two cakes if you’d be so kind.’
He took the cups and scones from her and sat next to me on one of the plastic chairs.
‘Jeeez, Saul!’ He bit into the raisin scone and sipped his tea.
We sat in silence while I cried.
The last time I saw Jack was at the French bistro where he had eaten most of my moules and made me pay for the extra bread.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that was not the last time we saw each other.’
After a while he put down his tea and reached for my hand. His was unnaturally warm from holding the plastic cup of tea.
‘I am a father now,’ I said to him.
‘Yes. I know all about that tragedy. It happened a long time ago.’
‘Did it?’
‘You know it did.’
Jack chewed on his scone and passed me mine.
I did not tell him how Isaac’s face came back to me during the long nights in this hospital on the Euston Road. The nights that flowed into post-war East Germany and into twentieth-century Massachusetts and into the house in Bethnal Green and back to West Berlin in 1979 where I bought my father an early edition of The Communist Manifesto. I paid for it with all of my student grant. I had no money after that. My brother sent me the train fare to get home from Cambridge when the term ended.
I pushed my scone towards Jack. ‘You can have mine as well. I live on morphine.’
‘I’m good.’ He lifted his left hand and lightly patted his stomach, his right hand still squeezing my hand.
‘You know, Saul, I have recently returned from former East Germany. Zwickau, to be precise. It used to be the home of the Trabant factory. I was covering a car fair there for a newspaper. There were quite a few Trabants on display.’
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘The Trabant is the East German family car.’
‘Well, it used to be,’ he said. ‘While I was there, I interviewed a young woman who still owned the Trabi that had belonged to her grandfather in the late fifties. It was one of her most treasured possessions.’
‘What was her name?’
‘I’ve forgotten. Why do you want to know?’
‘Was her name Luna?’
‘Oh, I think I would have remembered that name if it was. She was good company.’
Jack started to tell me more about the Trabants on display at the fair.
He made some sort of joke about how the design had never changed.
‘You have to understand,’ I said, reaching for my tea, which now had a skin of milk settling across the top, ‘the West had banned exports of steel to the GDR and it had no reserves of its own. It was an ingenious design. The first vehicle to be made with recycled materials.’
‘You are your father’s son after all.’ Jack squeezed my hand. ‘How are you, my friend?’
I wasn’t in the mood to talk. The mournful sound of the rubber wheels of the tea trolley squeaking on the lino floor was the right soundtrack for the end of the world. Sometimes the tea lady lost her grip and the trolley hit the corners of the walls and beds. It was the equivalent of waterfalls and parrots in my new terrible world.
‘She could deliver the tea in a Trabi,’ Jack whispered in my ear. ‘At least it had a steering wheel.’
I leaned my head back and rested it on the wall. ‘The last time we met, you ate all my lunch and charged me for the extra bread.’
‘That wasn’t the last time we met. But yes, that day was the start of everything. Do you remember what happened when we got home?’
‘No.’
‘I threw up because I had eaten the mussels that hadn’t opened.’
‘You were supposed to be playing tennis.’
‘After I’d thrown up I had a shower and went to bed.’
‘And I got into bed with you.’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you were unloving,’ I replied.
‘I think I was in those days.’
‘Are you with someone now?’
The tea trolley hit the wall again. And again.
‘Yes. Very much so. And you, Saul?’
‘I have sex all the time but I don’t know if it’s the sex I had thirty years ago or three months ago. I think I have extended my sexual history across all the time zones, but I did have a lot of sex before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. After that it’s a blur but I think I had less sex in social democracies than I did in authoritarian regimes.’
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘get better soon and have more sex.’
After a while he slipped the second scone into his jacket pocket.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I meant to say how sorry I am to h
ear about the death of your father.’
I told him not to be sorry, because my father had died many times. The first time he died was around thirty years ago. I had got used to him dying and coming back to life and then dying again. Jack asked me to explain.
‘It’s an unconscious thought crime,’ I said. ‘Stalin knew about those and wanted to assassinate anyone who had them, which is all of us.’
‘Yes, well, your father is definitely dead, Saul. And I’m sorry he won’t be around to pick apples from our trees.’
I could hear Jennifer talking on the phone in the corridor. She was wearing blue suede sandals and a matching blue trouser suit. She told me she had been in touch with Matt about the funeral arrangements for my father. I told her (again) that my father had died many times before he died. In fact, she had worn that very same blue trouser suit to the funeral the first time he died, around thirty years ago.
‘Right.’ She didn’t look that interested.
‘Hello, Jack.’
‘Hi, Jennifer.’
They began to whisper to each other as if I weren’t there.
Jack was saying odd things that didn’t make sense.
‘He thinks he is walking.’
Jennifer seemed tearful. I remembered that her own father had died when she was twelve. I meant to say something about that but I didn’t know how or where to begin. We had spent a lifetime running away from our love for each other. Instead I asked her about her art.
‘Tell me [again] what you did after your graduation show.’
‘That was such a long time ago.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yes,’ Jack interrupted. ‘Nearly thirty years ago.’
‘I was thinking about male beauty when I graduated,’ Jennifer said. ‘That’s because of you. I can’t remember that much about it. I was looking at athletes and gods and warriors and hermaphrodites. The boys and men with full pouting lips, thin waists, small penises, oiled hair, delicate toes. And I was looking at Donatello’s David and I was trying to figure out if the penis is what makes a man a man.’
‘I know you liked my penis.’
She laughed. ‘I did.’
Rainer was standing next to us.
