The Apartment: A Novel

by Greg Baxter

  He saw a sign on the road and slowed down to read it. This is us, he said. And we turned right, onto a road that was narrower and more overgrown at its edges. This is the first time you’ve been here? I asked. Yep, he said. He was lying, but I didn’t take the lie as an insult. He thought of himself, I guessed, as a kind of entertainer, a magician of human responses. What he wanted, perhaps, was for me to feel that this place was unscathed by his own memories, and we could experience it for the first time together. He had lied out of politeness, in a way. We stayed on the new road for about five kilometres – I was keeping close watch of the way we travelled, and the distance, in case I had to make it back on my own, in case this whole thing was an epic joke – then turned left onto an even narrower road, hardly wide enough to hold the Range Rover. Then there was a little blue-and-white sign with a P on it, for parking. Nothing else, at that moment, but the sign. Early slowed down and pointed. See it? he asked. I sat up high in my seat. Not really, I said. Okay, he said. He turned into the parking lot. There was nobody else there, not a single car, but there were spaces for five hundred cars and for dozens of tour buses. He parked roughly in the middle of the lot, which gave us an unnecessarily long distance to walk. And he had initially parked outside the lines, so he hopped back in and reparked. He tried a few times, but the Range Rover would not fit inside a space. When he got out he said, This ain’t a fucking Fiat Punto. We walked together across the lot, then straight onto the grass, which was brittle and slippery with frost. I had to walk in short steps. There was a strong smell of silage, and faraway clanking noises that echoed in the limitless distances. Early, who had heavy boots, walked without difficulty. I veered onto a gravel footpath, where the walking was easier. Ahead and below I could see that the earth was depressed, and in that depression I could see little mounds of bricks. Standing just in front of the excavated area was a large wall with a bird’s-eye illustration of the site. I stopped at it, and read some of the information about it in English – there were five or six different languages, including, oddly, Portuguese, unless I don’t know my flags. Anything interesting? Early shouted over. But he didn’t wait for the answer, and I felt it had been less a question than a good-natured reminder that there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who go see the ruins first, and the ones who read about them first. The site was a Roman military outpost, and the only structures that remained, though ruined, were the walls of a small barracks. The Romans had come here around 5 BC, and these walls were from the century after that. Early – every time I say that name in my memory I see him riding that bicycle, in sunglasses, and wearing those teeth, and I feel both joy and uneasiness – had stepped over the ankle-high wire divider that visitors were not supposed to cross and was standing in the site, spitting tobacco juice. I joined him. No shit, he said, couple of guys like us, over here, standing in this spot. I know very little about Rome, I said. In the Aeneid, said Early, Virgil declares that Rome came out of the ashes of Troy. The half-god Aeneas led his people to Italy. There he defeated Turnus, King of the Rutulians. Early then recited these lines: The giant Turnus, struck, falls to earth; his knees bend under him. All the Rutulians leap up with a groan, and the mountain slopes around re-echo, tall forests, far and near, return that voice. Early spoke this as a kind of country funeral prayer, looking up instead of down. Then he paused and coughed, and spat into his cup. And, well, he said, this is as far as they got in this direction. We looked out, across the plains, at nothing, at wind. I thanked him for bringing me along. You bet, he said. Tomorrow, he said, all this will be a memory. I’ll be on some United flight drinking Scotch and talking to some idiot from Boeing who wants to tell me about efficiency and some conference I ought to attend, because his keynote will be about the very challenges I face every day. I nodded. It was obvious to me that he’d been to that place often. The spot he stood in seemed precise. He did not move from it until we left. I walked around and examined some of the old walls. I got down on my knees and touched them. I put my hands in dirt and grass. Early just stood there, like a man who knew it well enough to just stand there. I never thought it was odd that he’d taken me to that place. Everybody I was meeting – I can’t remember now if I met Early before I met Fritz, but they were not the only ones – was taking me to sacred places.

  We drove back to the train station much more slowly than we had driven to the ruins, and this made me suspect that Early, the comedian, had grown sad. On the way I told him about something I’d seen on the rooftop of Saddam’s palace, a little bit of graffiti, all alone, written in permanent marker. It read, None of this is possible without Ireland. I paused after I told him that, and waited. Early, I suppose, was waiting for me to finish, but that was all I had to say. I figure, I said, with you as a history buff, you might have some idea of what it was about. He shrugged. Probably just some third-generation dickhead, he said, trying to rub his cock over everything. He dropped me at the station. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was blazing, without heat, just above the horizon. I knew Early was going back to the city for his flight the next day, but I was glad he dropped me at the station rather than offer to drive me all the way. The drive to the city would take two or three hours, and we didn’t have two or three hours of conversation in us. We shook hands inside the Range Rover. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye, he said. And then I walked into the station and sat down on a bench and waited a few hours. A train arrived, and three people got off. They wore heavy black coats and walked cheerlessly. I boarded, having no idea where the train was headed, but having assumed, correctly, that trains from there went in only one direction, and a few hours later I was back in the restaurant of Hotel Rus, looking out at the street, smiling at Mrs Pyz when she walked by, and eager to get some sleep.

  We are on the street again, and in the cold, and I am admiring the feel of the cut of my new coat and the warmth of everything but the scarf, which is not warm at all. Saskia says, We have about an hour before we have to see the apartment. It will take about half an hour to get there, but it’s a good thing to be early. Manuela says, Landlords are thieves and liars. Don’t be surprised if someone else comes along to look at the place and tries to outbid you. They’ll be the landlord’s friend. I say, You get them where I’m from, too. The street is wet and the gutters have grey snow in them. The sidewalks have been pounded into slush by shoppers. The unlit Christmas decorations strung between the buildings – huge chandeliers, sleighs, angels – rock excessively, like they are bursting to be turned on. I cannot wait for night. I cannot wait to walk under Christmas lights. Everybody has bags in their hands. There are beggars every hundred yards. They are mostly Roma, mostly women, young, with tiny babies. All you can see of the babies is little faces. Most of them are asleep but some are awake. The young women weep as you approach. They find someone to make eye contact with and weep all over them. And then you pass without giving anything and they say, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, until you are out of range. The other day I was sitting in a little café I sometimes spend time in, and on the pavement outside the window there was a little cluster of telephone boxes, all badly vandalized – since nobody in the world uses payphones any more. A young Roma girl, maybe sixteen and very pretty, sat outside, and glanced up at me with a really clumsy seductiveness every few minutes. I’d seen her before in that spot, and in the underground station nearby. I was inside having one coffee after another, reading Virgil – which I’d found in an English-language bookshop – for the lines Early pointed out. They are at the very end, of course, but one cannot understand them out of context. The girl was on a cardboard mat, as she always was when begging outside the café, kneeling inside a dirty sleeping bag, and she wore a puffy coat. A young man came by every so often – on each occasion I’d seen the girl, I’d seen him, too, drifting by at irregular intervals, watching her from a long way off – to collect money. They chatted coolly, like business partners, and when he would leave she would smile or laugh at whatever he
had said in parting. Men seemed to give her a great deal of money, perhaps because she was so pretty. Older women knelt beside her, gave her a coffee, and spoke with her for a while – maybe they discussed her welfare, or her future, or fished for allegations of abuse – but for most of the time she was on that cardboard mat, she just sat and did nothing, interacted with no one, and stared into nothingness. I don’t think she’d ever noticed me before, but on this occasion, as I sat there reading Virgil, she, for whatever reason, kept glancing at me as though we were at opposite ends of a nightclub. I checked behind me, to see that there was nobody else she was looking at. And though it was merely one of those thoughts that go through your mind so fast that you have no idea they have arrived until they are gone, I considered the feasibility of walking outside, telling her I’d pay her for sex, and doing all the terrible sexual things I’ve ever wanted to do to women in my life, things my instincts wish for but I do not, in a long afternoon. That is a thought that takes some time to articulate but no time to think. And just as I was about to order a fourth or fifth coffee the young man returned. He kicked her in the face and I saw her jaw break – perhaps it did not break, but it seemed to move momentarily off her face. She fell backward and her head slapped the concrete. There were screams in the café. There were screams on the street. The young man stood over her, clenching his fists, the way Ali stood over Liston. She got up somehow, but she was staggering. People in the café were standing now, and shouting through the glass. The boy grabbed the girl and held her up against the telephone box and struck her so hard that blood splattered in the air, and she fell heavily and unconsciously to the pavement. A man on the street, an elderly man, tried to grab the young man. The young man pushed him back. People rushed out of the café to the street. The pedestrians on the street gathered, and they stood around the man in a circle and shouted. The boy shouted back at the crowd, then he jogged off. Then the crowd, for the most part, dispersed, except for three or four people who knelt beside the girl and two people who knelt over the old man, who seemed to be in shock, and who was the only spectator who had actually dared to intervene. But everyone else in the place had at least stood in order to express their horror, and some had rushed outside. I had stayed seated. I had never moved. I’d finished my coffee while he beat her. And it occurs to me only now, because until now I had isolated those memories from each other, that it was just an hour after this incident that I met Saskia for the first time, at the National Gallery. And now I remember the painting I was sitting in front of, while reading Virgil, when she approached and asked if I minded if she sat down beside me.

  I had found a bench in front of the painting – a very small painting – which I found peculiar but not particularly exhilarating, and there was nobody else about at the time. I was spending lots of time in museums, especially art museums, and one of the things I gradually became more and more aware of was a ludicrous but entirely spooky sense, which presumably no one else shared, that human beings are unwanted disturbances, that the various works hanging nakedly on walls, for instance, are desperate to evict the living, because to have to watch us plodding around them is torture, and that day it occurred to me that the same could be said for the Aeneid, doomed for eternity to be read by students, snobs and imbeciles. The painting was Piero’s Flagellation. In it, three men are gathered in the foreground, on the right side of the painting, and they are staring in different directions. To the left of them, in the background, Christ is being whipped. I read, on a plaque beside the small painting, a little bit about the use of common perspective, which Piero introduced with his treatise, Perspective in Painting. Piero had been known principally as a mathematician in his time, but now he was known mainly for his art – and this painting, the Flagellation, had been called the greatest small painting in history. After reading this, I sat down and flipped through Virgil, and a little while later Saskia sat down beside me, putting a briefcase between us. She studied the painting for about ten minutes, then ate a sandwich. Since there is a rule prohibiting food, she ate it by looking around, taking it out of the briefcase, biting into it, and placing it back into the briefcase. I found this really amusing and smiled at her. She said, I recently finished the Aeneid. Well, last year. It’s good, I said. I expected it to be very hard to read, but it’s easy. A little while later, when we were discussing the Piero, which was to return shortly to its home in a museum in Urbino – it’s probably already back there – she said that the major shift from Medieval to Renaissance art was the fact that the people in paintings were no longer representations of characters in narratives outside the painting but characters within a narrative. This meant ideas became embodied. Perspective, she said, was a crucial part of this transformation, because, among many other things, it forced the human eye to consider its subject first as a thing and less as a symbol. Before she left to return to work, and against my intention to avoid getting to know new people, we exchanged numbers. After she left I spent some more time with the Piero, as she suggested, since I had not understood what made it the greatest small painting in history, and found something really wonderful and mysterious in it, which I had entirely missed at first. After that, I went to the museum’s bookshop, which was vast, and included, at one end, a spacious and tidy internet café, and read a bit about perspective. It was unthinkably strange that something so obvious would have eluded art for so long. And when the question of it did arise, I read, a full, intricate understanding of perspective was achieved not overnight, as I would have guessed, but over a period of four hundred years. I had been born at a time when an understanding of optics was taken for granted, and when realism in art had already been born, perfected, and exhausted. It was disconcerting to think that if I had been born in the fifteenth century, or the sixteenth, I would have been incapable of understanding the physics behind artistic perspective. In the earliest art, such as Egyptian art, I read, works were constructed with vertical perspective. If someone were in front of somebody else, the artist simply placed the closer person below the person farther away. Often an object’s position on the page had to do with its thematic importance to the story the painting was telling, so that you might have minor scenes playing out at the bottom of paintings, such as a battle, with small figures, and large figures above them. At this time it was not understood that the nearness and distance of objects could be represented by size, and the first evidence that artists had begun to associate size with depth in a field didn’t emerge until late antiquity. Then, suddenly, from the early Middle Ages onward, interest in perspective vanished, and it would not re-emerge until the rule of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance. Throughout its history, at least until it became untenable as a method of inquiry, the study of perspective seemed to be, among other things, a sign that human beings believed in an intellectual destiny that was contained in the intersecting lines of reality; by studying those lines we studied that destiny. In Byzantine art, where principles of perspective were well understood, reverse perspective was often used, so that the farther away an object got, the larger it became. In this way, the vanishing point became the viewer, and, so the book I read speculated, the lines of convergence, which would have, in reverse perspective, naturally come from everywhere, represented the omnipresence of God. The breakthroughs that would take place in fifteenth-century Florence were driven by a handful of artists, all of whom were deeply influenced by each other and some of whom were profoundly influenced by the eleventh-century work of a man named al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen, who was born in the city of Basra, and composed his great work, the Book of Optics, while under house arrest in Cairo. Alhazen’s discoveries resolved the ancient dispute between the mathematicians, like Ptolemy and Euclid, and the physicists, like Aristotle, over the nature of vision and light. He also showed that vision is not merely a phenomenon of pure sensation but also of judgement, imagination and memory. In the Flagellation, the section of ceiling above Christ is filled with light. The light is miraculous: it has no source. Everything
apart from that light is geometrically and optically explicable. Christ is aware of the light, but his torturers are not.