by David Szalay
Simon himself feels very shaky. Without saying anything he stands up and wanders off to find the bathroom. There, forgetting where he is, he spends a long time staring at some shampoo bottles and a windup plastic frog on the tiled edge of the bath. He just stands there for a long time, staring at them. He is staring at the wind-up plastic frog, its innocent green face. The hum of the extractor fan sounds more and more like sobbing.
When he sits down on the living-room floor again, about twenty minutes later, Otto asks him, ‘How much shit is left?’
‘None,’ Simon says. The living room – all beige and cream and Oriental art – seems unfamiliar, as if he is seeing it for the first time.
‘You finished the shit?’
Ferdinand, in spite of himself, starts giggling, and then keeps saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’
‘You finished the shit?’ Otto says again, still in the same tone of disbelief.
Ferdinand giggles and says he is sorry.
‘Yes,’ Simon says. He has also hot-rocked the pale, lustrous carpet but he decides not to mention that now.
‘Fuck,’ Otto says. And then, as if it might have been a joke, ‘Really, you finished it?’
‘Really.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Ferdinand says, suddenly with an extremely serious expression on his face.
Otto sighs. ‘Okay,’ he says. He has not quite come to terms with it though. ‘Fuck,’ he says a few seconds later, ‘you finished the shit …’
Slowly, Simon inserts himself into his sleeping bag and turns away from them. They are still talking when he falls asleep.
*
The next day he and Ferdinand visit Potsdam. It is the one thing Simon seems to want to do while they are in Berlin – see the Palace of Sanssouci.
From Potsdam station, an ornate green-painted gate. Then an avenue of small trees, and the palace on the summit of a terraced hill. At the foot of the hill a fountain flings high into the air, and white stone statues dot the park – men molesting women, or fighting each other, or frowning nobly at something far away, each frozen in some posture of obscure frenzy, frozen among quiet hedges, or next to the still surfaces of ornamental pools.
Simon wanders through this landscape – the long straight tree-lined walks, the fountains where they intersect, the facades where they end – with a kind of exhilaration.
There is a place to have tea and they sit on metal outdoor furniture and he talks about how the whole landscape, like the music of J. S. Bach, is expressive of the natural order of the human mind.
Ferdinand, eating cake, complains about the acne on his back, that it stains his shirt.
Simon has a similar problem but does not mention it. (He is fastidious, also, about concealing his body from his friend.) Instead, he puts down The Ambassadors, and tells Ferdinand about Frederick William, Frederick the Great’s father, and his obsession with his guardsmen – how they all had to be extremely tall, and how he fussed over the details of their uniforms, and how he liked to watch them march when he was feeling unwell. The story makes Ferdinand laugh. ‘That’s brilliant,’ he says, using his finger to take the last smear of cream from his plate. Complacently, Simon finishes his tea and picks up his book again. It is late afternoon – they had trouble finding the place. The shadows of the statues stretch out over the smooth lawns.
‘What should we do this evening?’ Ferdinand says.
Simon, without looking up from his book, gives a minimal shrug.
Otto’s sister, who was in the flat when they woke up, had suggested they join her, and her friends Lutz and Willi, for a night on the town. Ferdinand now alludes to this possibility. Simon, once again, is studiedly non-committal. The prospect of spending the evening with Otto’s sister and her friends fills him with something not unlike fear, a sort of fluttering panic. ‘They’re twats, aren’t they?’ he says, still in his book. He and Ferdinand have spent much of the day laughing at Lutz and Willi – their leathers, their piercings, Lutz’s shrill laugh, Willi’s morose moustache.
‘They seem okay,’ Ferdinand says wistfully. For ten days, he has had only Simon for company. ‘And Otto’s sister’s nice.’
‘Is she?’
‘Isn’t she?’
‘She’s okay,’ Simon pronounces, turning a page, ‘I suppose.’
‘Anyway, what else are we going to do?’ Ferdinand asks, with a sort of laugh.
‘Don’t know.’
‘I mean, let’s just have a drink with them anyway,’ Ferdinand says. ‘They can’t be that bad.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Time we were getting back.’
‘Really?’ Simon says, turning his head to look at the shadow-filled park. ‘I like it here.’
In the end, they do spend part of the evening with Otto’s sister and Lutz and Willi. Simon seems determined not to enjoy himself. He just sits there with a solemn expression on his face while the others talk until Ferdinand is almost embarrassed by his presence – a detached unhappy figure, sipping home-made wine. They are in a hippyish place in Kreuzberg, sitting outside, under some trees whose blossoms have a spermy smell.
‘What’s the matter with your friend?’ Lutz asks Ferdinand, leaning over to whisper it with a jingle of piercings. ‘Is he okay?’ Lutz is sandy-haired and ugly.
‘I don’t know,’ Ferdinand says, loud enough for Simon to overhear him, though he pretends not to. ‘He’s always like that.’
‘Then he must be fun to travel with.’
Ferdinand just laughs.
Lutz says, ‘He’s just shy, no?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m sure he’s okay.’
‘Of course,’ Ferdinand says. ‘He’s very intelligent.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘And very funny sometimes.’
‘Yah?’
‘Really.’
‘I can’t imagine it,’ Lutz says.
His friend Willi, however, is almost as taciturn as Simon, and smiles as little, and for the most part the evening is a matter of Ferdinand, Lutz, and Otto’s sister. They talk, inevitably, about the places Ferdinand and Simon have already been to, and what they have done there – the tourist sites they have visited, mostly ecclesiastical. This outrages Lutz. ‘You can do all that shit when you’re older!’ he protests. ‘You don’t need to do that now! What do you want to do in churches? That’s for when your hairs are grey. How old are you boys?’ he asks.
They tell him – seventeen.
‘You’re so young still,’ Lutz says feelingly, though he is at most ten years older. ‘Have fun, okay? Okay?’
2
Have fun.
An overnight train to Prague. There is not a single empty seat, and they spend the night lying on the floor outside the toilet, where they are frequently kicked by passing feet.
Some time after dawn they stand up and look for something to eat.
Outside, the undulating landscape skims past in lovely morning light.
Pine forests wrapped in smoky mist.
Simon is still thinking of a dream he had during one particular snatch of sleep on the floor. Something to do with something under a lake, something that was his. Then he was talking to someone from school, talking about Karen Fielding. The person he was talking to had used a strange word, a word that might not even exist. And then he had passed Karen Fielding herself in a narrow doorway, and lowered his eyes, and when he looked up she had smiled at him and he had woken saturated, for a moment, with indescribable joy.
‘You look totally fucking miserable, mate,’ Ferdinand says, sitting opposite him at a table in the dining car.
‘Do I?’
‘I mean – are you okay? You don’t look well.’
Ferdinand is, he thinks, making an obvious effort to patch things up.
There was a falling-out the previous day, over the travel plans.
Simon had wanted to take an early train to Prague. Ferdinand had not wanted to do this. He had wanted to take Otto up on his off
er of showing them a fun time in Berlin.
Simon had, as usual, silently insisted on having his own way – and then it turned out he wanted to stop in Leipzig to visit the tomb of J. S. Bach.
He had more or less tricked him into the Leipzig stopover, Ferdinand felt, and it had been an awful experience. Ten hours in the station and the diesel-stained streets that surrounded it – the next train to Prague did not leave until the middle of the night – all for the sake of a few minutes in the frigid Thomaskirche, which Simon himself had described as ‘intrinsically unimpressive’.
Finally, at about midnight, no longer speaking, they sat down to wait on the station platform, where some young German Christians were singing songs like ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Blowing in the Wind’ as the rain fell past the tall lights and out on the dark tracks.
Simon seems not to have noticed the falling-out, let alone his friend’s efforts, in the morning, to patch things up.
He is looking out of the window, the low sun on his handsome profile, his hands shaking slightly after the dreadful night.
‘We get to Prague in about an hour,’ Ferdinand says.
‘Yeah?’ From somewhere an image has entered Simon’s head, an image of human life as bubbles rising through water. The bubbles rise in streams and clouds, touching and mingling and yet each remaining individually defined as they travel upwards from the depths towards the light, until at the surface they cease to exist as individual entities. In the water they existed physically, individually – in the air they are part of the air, part of an endless whole, inseparable from everything else. Yes, he thinks, squinting in the mist-softened sunlight, tears filling his eyes, that is how it is – life and death.
‘Where do you think we should stay?’ Ferdinand asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Hostel?’
‘Okay,’ Simon says, still watching the landscape, the lifting mist.
It all happens very fast. Desperate-looking men wait on the platform when the train pulls in. Their upturned faces pass in the windows smoothly as the train sheds the last of its speed. The English teenagers are the subject of a tussle as they are still descending the steep steel steps, and a few minutes later are in a Skoda which is older than they are, whose engine sounds like a wasp and blows prodigious quantities of blueish exhaust. The fumes have a heady, sweetish smell. The flowering trees also. Their driver, other than his native language, speaks only a few words of German. ‘Zimmer frei, zimmer frei,’ he had insisted at the station, physically seizing their packs and making a dash for his vehicle.
They drive for twenty minutes or so, mostly uphill (and thus very, very slowly), into a spring-greeny suburb of disintegrating tarmac and faded dwellings in small plots of land, until they pull up, finally, in front of a single-storey house with a tree in front of it, the path underneath littered and plastered with fallen blossoms. This is where their driver lives with his wife, and she speaks some English.
Birdsong meets them as they emerge from the Skoda, and she is there too, opening the squeaky front gate with enthusiasm, even a kind of impatience. She is probably about forty and looks as if she has just got out of bed. Her hair – a sort of aureate beige – is loose and unkempt, and she is wearing a yellow towelling dressing gown and blue plastic sandals. She comes forward over the blossom-thick pavement in her blue sandals, through the shattered shade that leaves flecks of light on her smooth-skinned face, smiling, and sticks a pair of kisses on each of the young visitor’s faces. Then she hurries them inside and shows them to what will be their room – a single bed, a stained foam mattress on the floor, a leaf-filled window. She smiles at them as they take in the room tiredly. ‘Is okay?’ she says.
She tells them to leave their things there and join her for breakfast, so they follow her along a passage with a washing machine in it, past what seems to be a nasty bathroom, and into a kitchen.
Simon is still thinking of the dream he had on the train as he follows her into the kitchen with his friend. It seems more present to him than where he is, than the washing machine he has just walked past, than the sunny kitchen where he is being told to sit down.
the only where I want to be
She is doing something now, at this moment, she is doing something as he sits down at a small square table in the sunny kitchen. And the smile she showed him in his dream seems realer than the woman now taking things from the fridge and explaining to them why, in opting to stay with her, they have made the right decision.
The smile she showed him in his dream. It is possible he just inferred it. Her face was not actually smiling. Indeed, it had a serious expression. Pale, framed by her dark hair, it had a serious expression. Yet her doll-blue eyes were dense with tenderness and somehow he knew that she was smiling at him. Then he woke to the first daylight filling out the interior of the train, and the feverish sound of the train’s wheels.
She says she isn’t interested in money – that isn’t why she takes people in. She just likes people, she says, and wants to help them. She will do everything she can to help them. ‘I will help you,’ she says to them. The house, she admits, is not exactly in the centre of town, but she promises them it isn’t difficult to get there. She will show them how, and while they eat she does, spreading a map on the kitchen table and tracing with her finger the way to the Metro station, though most of the route seems to lie just at the point where the map folds and the paper is worn and illegible.
They are drinking slivovice from little cups the shape of acorns and the air is grey and stinging with cigarette smoke. She is also, as she leans over the tattered, expansive map of Prague with its districts in different colours, being somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what – if anything – she is wearing underneath it, something that Ferdinand has noticed, and to which he has just tried to draw his friend’s attention with a salacious smile and a movement of his head, when her husband steps in, takes the cigarette out of his small mouth and says something in Czech.
She tries to shoo him away, not even looking up from what she is doing – tracing something on the map, a sinuous street, with her chipped fingertip – and they have what seems to be a short, fierce dispute.
Ferdinand is still smiling salaciously.
She is still leaning over the map.
Her husband stands there for a moment, simmering with displeasure. Then he leaves, and she tells them he is off to work. He is a former professional footballer, she explains, now a PE teacher.
She sits down and lights another cigarette and lays a hand on Simon’s knee. (She seems, in spite of his silence, to have taken a particular liking to Simon.) ‘My hahs-band,’ she says, ‘he know nah-thing but football.’ There is a pause. Her hand is still on his knee. ‘You understand me?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
Drinking spirits so early in the morning, and after such a terrible night, has made him very woozy. He is not quite sure what is happening, what she is talking about. Everything seems unusually vivid – the sun-flooded kitchen, the pictures of kittens on the wall, the blue eyes of the footballer’s wife, her fine parchment-like skin. She is holding him with a disquieting stare. His eyes fall and he finds himself looking at her narrow, naked knees.
Her eyes again.
‘He know nah-thing but football,’ she says. He is looking at her mouth when she says that. ‘You understand me.’ It does not seem to be a question this time. It sounds more like an instruction.
‘And you young boys,’ she says, smiling happily, taking up the brandy bottle, ‘you like sport?’
‘I do,’ Ferdinand tells her.
‘Yes?’
‘Simon doesn’t.’
‘That’s not true,’ Simon mutters irritably.
She doesn’t seem to hear that. She says, turning to him, ‘Oh, no? What do you like? What do you like? I think I know what you like!’ And, putting her hand on his knee again, she starts to laugh.
‘Simon likes books,’ Ferdinand says.
‘O
h, you like books! That’s nice. I like books! Oh –’ she puts her hand on her heart – ‘I love books. My husband, he don’t like books. He is not interested in art. You are interested in art, I think?’
‘He’s interested in art,’ Ferdinand confirms.
‘Oh, that’s nice!’ With her eyes on Simon, she sighs. ‘Beauty,’ she says. ‘Beauty, beauty. I live for beauty. Look, I show you.’
Full of excitement, she takes him to a painting hanging in the hall. A flat, lifeless landscape in ugly lurid paint. She tells him she got it in Venice.
‘It’s nice,’ he says.
They stand there for a minute in silence.
He is aware, as he stares at the small terrible picture, of her standing next to him, of her hand warm and heavy on his shoulder.
‘Your friend,’ she says to Ferdinand, lighting another cigarette, ‘he understands.’ They are in the kitchen again.
‘He’s very intelligent,’ Ferdinand says.
‘He understands beauty.’
‘Definitely.’
‘He lives for beauty. He is like me.’ And then she says again, unscrewing the cap of the brandy bottle, ‘My husband, he know nothing but football.’
‘The beautiful game,’ Ferdinand jokes.
She laughs, though it isn’t clear whether she understood his joke. ‘You like football?’ she asks.
‘I’m more of a rugby man actually,’ Ferdinand says.
He then tries to explain what rugby is, while she smokes and listens, and occasionally asks questions that show she hasn’t understood anything.
