Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  Is silence even a good word for it? I’m not sure. There among the grey columns you could hear all the words that were still calling out to be said. The silence underneath the streets, coming up through the pavement. That’s what I was listening to, I think. An entire city full of words not even invented yet coming up to the surface.

  It was too cold to speak. So I got her back to the hotel and she wanted to go up to her room alone, I respected that. She wanted to spend some time on her own, without me asking questions. Even when I was not asking questions, my presence was like a conscience walking beside her.

  So that’s when I went to speak to Manfred and she went upstairs to her room. I gave Manfred the plans for the evening and let him know that we didn’t need him any more. I must have been there speaking to Manfred for a couple of minutes, no more. He protested a bit, but then he accepted the instructions given to him and left. And in that short space of time, she had gone up in the elevator. She must have got to the right floor because I had pressed the right number for her and even watched the dial outside going all the way up to the fourth floor. She knew the number of her room, there was no fear of her getting lost.

  When I was finished talking to Manfred, I went up to my room. I could understand that she wanted to be alone, but I phoned her room to make sure there was nothing she needed. There was no answer. I went around to knock on her door. She was probably having a rest and I didn’t want to disturb her. I walked up and down the corridor and came back to knock again, because it was not like her to ignore me like this without some reason. She should have told me that she was fine, at least, not to worry. And when I was getting no answer, I thought there might have been something wrong, was there some emergency I needed to help her with? I didn’t want to start worrying too much, only that hearing nothing made me think the worst. If only she had her mobile I could have contacted her that way, but it was switched off and I had her see-through bag in my hand in any case. I called her room again. There was still no answer, so I went back down to the lobby to see if she had somehow gone down there to look for me. That’s the only way I could explain it to myself. I was trying not to assume the worst thing right away. I even checked outside the hotel on the street, in case she went out there to see if I was talking to Manfred by the car, which was gone at that point. I ran back inside and went upstairs once more, banging on the door and shouting this time to see if she was all right in there. All I could think of doing was to go back down to the lobby, into the restaurant, around the hallways, anywhere I thought she might have got lost looking for me. I went to the reception to ask if she had left a message. She had to be in her room. I was sure something had happened to her. She might have fallen, maybe worse. I had no option but to go back to the reception desk and tell them it was an emergency. Not that I wanted to alarm them, only would they mind opening the door of her room, it was stupid of me not to have kept a spare key. This took a little while because they had to check my identity before they could even talk to me about another guest at the hotel. I explained that I was meant to be looking after her, so eventually they must have seen by the way I spoke, slightly agitated and almost losing my patience, that I was serious. They agreed to phone her room. But, of course, there was no answer, I could have told them that. And then I was thinking what kind of way was this to look after her? I should never have let her out of my sight.

  What was I thinking, letting a child go up in the elevator alone?

  One of the staff at the reception agreed to go up with me in order to check. And the trip in the elevator is longer than you think. There was nothing to say, no point in trying to get friendly with this man or trying to gain his trust and win him over by making some remark about the weather. He wanted to retain his doubts about me. He was not going to be drawn in until he got this clarified. So the elevator moved almost without moving. I was thinking about the dial reaching the fourth floor. The doors opened and the man from the reception walked at normal pace ahead of me, no hurry. He knocked on the door, politely calling out her name. All of which takes time. Valuable seconds spent on formalities before he eventually looked at me and looked at the door and then put his hand up to indicate that I should stand back, while he took the initiative and made the decision to open the door. He stepped into the room, cautiously at first, coughing and calling her name, you never know what you might come across in a situation like that. And she was not there. I knew it. I ran past him to check the bathroom, but there was no sign of her there either.

  She was lost in the hotel somewhere, but where?

  The man called the reception to report a guest missing, in a wheelchair. He gave her name and the room number. It was all about procedure and what to do next. But I had no time to wait. I went back down again, trying to work out what had happened. She must have been unable to find her room, just as I had suspected. The only thing to do now was to search for her, floor by floor, and then I heard her voice.

  Inside the elevator, I heard her calling. She was not in the elevator, but I could hear her voice clearly calling me.

  Liam. Liam. That’s all I heard.

  I couldn’t work out where. I called back. Other guests arriving with suitcases may have found it a bit unsettling, to see me coming out of the elevator calling, looking around as if I was lost, not right. I went up another floor and her voice was not there any more, so back down I went again until I could hear her, we were in communication. I thought she was in the elevator shaft somewhere. Incarcerated, inside the wall, or in the stairwell. Or maybe in some kind of storage area. I couldn’t figure it out. And then eventually I narrowed it down to the basement, she had to be down there, that was the only thing left I could think of. Why did it take me so long to work that out?

  The way I explained it to myself is that she went down in the one elevator that led to the basement, where I had not been looking. The other two elevators don’t go down that far. That was the problem. She had got the elevator that leads down to the underground car park.

  When I found her she was very upset. She was frightened and confused, breathing very rapidly, not making sense. The card key for the room was still in her hand, held tightly. She would not let it go. She was looking around to get her bearings, no idea where she was. And the surroundings were not like upstairs, no hardwood panelling or soft carpets. It was cold down there, with bare, bright lights and no need for décor, only scuffed paintwork. All this time, while I was trying to find out if she was in her room, she was trapped in the basement, shivering.

  Liam, she said. I saw my brother.

  I tried to calm her down.

  I saw him, she said. Jimmy.

  I tried to take her hand but she pulled away from me. She must have thought I was not going to believe what she was saying, because she kept repeating that she saw her brother. She said she tried to call the elevator and then she saw her little brother, he was whispering to her, she didn’t know what he was saying.

  He was looking into my eyes, she said. He’s in trouble, Liam, he needs me.

  Maybe it was all the medication. She was shivering and not getting enough air. And she was complaining of a horrible taste in her mouth, like chalk. Chalk and custard and bits of tobacco leaves, bits of seaweed, she said, stuck at the back of her throat. I gave her the see-through bag in case she wanted her medication, something to calm her down and bring her back to herself, maybe a bit of chocolate to get the taste of custard and seaweed out of her mouth. And then I did the breathing song with her. I told her to relax and breathe in and out calmly. Because it sounded like she had been in a race, completely out of breath, her nose was running. When you’re ready, I said, take in a deep breath and hold it for as long as you can, very good, hold it, hold it. Then I told her to let it all the way out again, all the way, all the way, all the way, very good, but she could only manage a few shallow puffs. I wanted her to try it again, one more time, but she was too upset. She was hardly getting any air at all into her lungs. As if time was running out. She was searchi
ng all around to see where her brother was, asking me if I could see him, would I go and check in those little rooms, those closets where he might be hiding, all the storage places where they keep detergents and cream cleansers and bath mats and shower caps and toilet rolls, all those little shampoo bottles people take with them and which have to be replaced for each new guest, because she worked in room service once and she would know where all these things were kept. Was he in any of those places hiding, she said, maybe in one of the empty boxes of materials delivered to the hotel, behind a trolley that was loaded with spare pillows and duvets and bedspreads, hiding to get away from the noise in his head of what he remembered as a child? Was he in the place where they do the washing, behind the dryers rotating, in the room where they store all the linen, was he in one of those presses stacked up with fresh linen, to keep safe?

  I had to get her out of the basement as quickly as possible. Come on, I said to her, let’s go back upstairs. I called the elevator and brought her up to her room, though she was still worried about her brother, saying he was lost and she couldn’t leave him down there. So I told her we had to find some way of getting her warm first, then we could go back and look for him. I had to get her into the bath. I had to stop her shivering. I had to get her ready for the opera. I had to pick up the tickets for Don Carlo.

  46

  We left the Adlon Hotel with plenty of time. She was going to see her family. She was going to meet them for the last time, alive on the stage, her father and mother. Her brother. Her family waiting at the Berlin State Opera.

  We passed by the Russian Embassy along the way. All the stuff that went on in there, she said, beyond those railings, and the guards so stern and silent outside. Sentry, she said. We passed by souvenir shops with lots of postcards and Berlin guides. Tankards and T-shirts with the green man walking. All the landmarks you could not mistake for any other city, a miniature plastic Brandenburg Gate that people bring home as proof. We continued on Unter den Linden until we got to the university, a big open square where we stopped for a while to look down at the white empty shelves underground. And because she said nothing, because she didn’t say go back now, let’s not go any further, I pushed the wheelchair on again, out of the square and up towards the entrance of the State Opera with its façade lit up.

  Don Carlo.

  I pushed her all the way in through the doors, right into the crowd of people waiting in the foyer, people standing in a line to hand in their coats. The smooth silent wheels of the wheelchair running along the carpet. I got her a programme and handed her the red glasses. She had no need for the programme, but she loved holding it in her hands and hearing the voices around her, the buzz, you could feel it.

  The ushers were calling out in German and in English, asking people to begin taking their seats. The foyer had chandeliers and gold-painted beading around the walls, like a palace. People were dressed up in their best gear, so to speak, their opera costumes. Women with off-the-shoulder dresses. Men wearing really good suits. Only one thin man in the middle of the crowd dressed in a crumpled jacket and a faded pink T-shirt. He was not interested in style. He was staring into the distance as though he could only concentrate on the opera ahead, like he didn’t eat very much and lived only through music, a human ear in the shape of a man.

  As we went in to take our seats she was smiling, like she was home at last. The usher took the wheelchair and said he would bring it back in at the interval, it was going to be right outside the door, just so we knew. The place was packed out, including all the private boxes. She looked at the circular dome above and the chandeliers. And then came the moment she was waiting for, when all the voices of people talking at once come together with the instruments tuning up, a million words mixed up with the random sounds of the orchestra, everyone for themselves and no order to it, only a big blur of notes and words before the lights go down and the silence returns and the performance begins.

  Can I silence the love within me?

  She reminded me of what happens in the opera.

  Can I silence that love? The key moment to watch out for, she said, as if she was saying it to herself.

  I wondered why Don Carlos doesn’t run away, that’s what I would have done. It’s the first thing that would occur to me, running away. Doesn’t everybody do that? Don’t we all run away? But I’m not Don Carlos and it’s not possible to escape from love. Because Don Carlos is in love with the Queen, the woman his father stole from him. So he can’t leave. No more than any one of us can leave. He’s trapped inside his life. All the people on stage are trapped in their lives, trapped inside the family. They can’t run away because their lives will come after them.

  And then something quite strange happened on stage. As the story begins to unfold and the King decides to kill the love inside himself to uphold his reign, he begins ruthlessly exercising his power and all these naked captives appear on stage, tied up with ropes around their wrists and feet. They are in very bad shape, tortured and starved, with lash marks across their bodies. I remembered walking by the sea once with my mother on a stormy day in the summer and we saw a man like that with cuts all over his body, like a crucifix, my mother said. He had been thrown without mercy against the rocks by the waves. He was shivering, I remember. Under his shoulder, the skin had been torn right off, like a piece missing, his knees were red and his towel was pink with blood and he was just staring back at the waves that nearly killed him. That’s what the King in Don Carlo had ordered his men to do to these people on stage, make them look like male and female people on the cross.

  While the King is having dinner with his family, his son stands up and threatens his father with a knife. There is a struggle and the knife is taken from Don Carlos. Then everything carries on as planned and the half-crucified people get strung up. Men in black paramilitary gear come in and pour petrol all over them. The naked and lashed people are left hanging by their feet, upside-down, above the stage, covered in petrol. I’m serious. All these half-alive men and women suspended by ropes around their ankles over the stage, blood and petrol dripping from their bodies and their hair falling down, they look like carcasses. While the King continues having his dinner and drinking wine, the Queen has to sit there and keep him company, even though she doesn’t love him, she loves his son instead, Don Carlos.

  What is that for? Úna said. What are all those poor people doing naked on stage?

  They’re the victims, so I gather. People who spoke against the King.

  That is ridiculous, she said.

  She actually laughed out loud. More like a laugh and a shout together. What? Because she had seen this particular opera many times and she had never seen anything like this before. Never, she said. They had nothing like this at the Met. Have they no imagination left? Does everything barbaric have to be so barbaric on the stage, she said.

  It is a bit barbaric, I agreed.

  This is terrible, Liam. This whole thing is wrong.

  She was getting quite worked up. Rubbish, she was saying, which I believe she was quite entitled to do, responding emotionally to the drama. People were shouting bravo every now and then to make sure they could be heard listening. So what was wrong with her offering her opinion as well.

  This is awful, she shouted. Awful. Awful. Awful.

  I asked her to keep her voice down but she couldn’t. Her imagination was too big. She didn’t have her bag with her either, so there was no medication at hand to calm her down.

  Please, one of the men close to us said.

  And then luckily the interval came. The men in paramilitary gear came to set fire to the naked people. So I ran and got the wheelchair. She was still shouting on the way out, saying it was wrong not to allow us to imagine the worst for ourselves. But then I knew it was not the naked people that were bothering her so much as her own brother up on stage. Her own family in front of her eyes.

  She didn’t want to go back after the interval. We were waiting in the foyer and once the audience began to ta
ke their seats again for the second part of the evening, she put her hand up to let me know that she wanted to stay out.

  I don’t want to see my brother like this, she said.

  So we didn’t take our seats again. We stayed in the foyer watching all the people drifting back inside. The orchestra started to tune up again without us. We had the foyer to ourselves, except for one of the ushers coming to ask us if we were waiting for a taxi. She didn’t want to stay and she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to remain close by and listen without seeing, particularly the aria where the King sings about the Queen having no love for him.

  I was curious to find out what happens in the end, how the father kills his own son. I asked her how Don Carlos dies, but she seemed to forget which family I was talking about. She said he came back to Dublin and he could never find his feet again. She said she bought an apartment for him to live in but that didn’t mean all that much to him and he was not really able to live on his own. She couldn’t give him any more money because she thought he would only kill himself with it, that’s how she put it. I didn’t want to kill him with money. He was taking all kinds of drugs and drinking heavily and nobody could rescue him. She was in New York at the time and she kept asking to find out how he was, but it was hard to come back and see him going downhill, not even feeding himself, only drinking and hiding to forget. And then he was found one day lying out in the back garden, face down like his own mother.

  She said it was not her father who killed him. Her father and mother were in love, and maybe that’s the danger of people being so insanely in love, they didn’t care about their children. Her brother was a casualty of love, she said.

  Instead of continuing to accuse her father of murder, this time she was pointing the finger at herself. I think it was hard for her to say this. She said she should have looked out for her brother a bit more, she could have rescued him.