Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  Paul listened, silent, and his emotions recast the space around him, a place that had been familiar and safe and no longer was – he had discovered another side of it. The stakes had suddenly shifted. He was afraid. Nothing had changed but everything had changed; fear slipped into his heart, through the sentences Albers enunciated – not only the words but the silence around them, silence that was no longer neutral nor necessary but terrifying. He finally asked: Where is she? She’s sleeping, Albers replied. He considered getting up and leaving. He couldn’t bear the idea – which should have been bearable, maybe even desirable, since he had just landed on that possibility himself – that she might be somewhere there, hidden, behind a door, a wall. Such moments in a life (instants of animal instinct; pure panic) were not to be underestimated. Albers herself described having become who she was – a woman who looked for ways out – after noticing the space around her, one day, in her childhood: on a narrow landing, facing a wild animal. Paul had forgotten what kind, or rather the story had been told so many times that it was now like a myth, told in numerous variations that, rather than cancelling each other out, reinforced one another, deepened the story. A snarling dog, or a fox, or a wolf. And, facing its jaws, she intuited the exact proportions of the space she was in; she keenly, instinctively knew where the exits were. Or should have been.

  Ten years earlier, when he had opened the door of 313 only to find nothing there – nothing aside from that auburn mass of hair in the bathroom waste bin; a lifetime’s worth, he guessed – he had called the police. Not for a second did he imagine that it might be anything other than a sordid crime, an act reported in two lines in a tabloid newspaper, the kind that he and Amelia had read aloud to each other every morning, secure in their belief that none of that whole circus of human misery had anything to do with their own lives. Everything about them felt so wonderfully ordinary: a short night, a black coffee, a bag of books resting on one knee and a lover’s hand on the other. He had called the police and waited on the sidewalk, in the night, for the car to come, sirens blaring, blue revolving lights flashing at regular intervals – light from another world, every four seconds. Every four seconds, the scene was commonplace – a picture window, a hotel, a small crowd; every four seconds, it was submerged in a parallel, underground, almost nightmarish dimension. The blue tended to saturate everything, to erase the difference between people and things, to flatten walls, fabrics and faces to a uniform surface; to drown dark circles under eyes just as wholly as the whites of those eyes, just like the veins that disappeared from Paul’s hands, from his furrowed brow. Yes, nightmarish, he thought, unable to answer the most basic questions, four seconds of life, four alien seconds.

  Paul didn’t know it but for a few minutes he had been the first (and sole) suspect in Amelia Dehr’s disappearance. He maintained that he had not left his desk that night, hadn’t seen her leave. In his terror he could already see the fragmented, choppy sentences in the trashy headlines, REDHEAD PACKED UP and LIMBS & LUGGAGE ON WHEELS. He could already see the security footage showing some guy leaving with a heavy suitcase, filmed from above, and Paul wishing him a pleasant evening without any suspicion that the woman he loved was folded up in that small space. But in fact, the suspect was him, he who had been with the missing woman, he who had returned to the crime scene, he who had, quite simply, looked the part. And then the security footage was reviewed, and after having been taken for the perp, Paul now seemed to be the fool, because everyone saw, clearly, undeniably, a buzz-cut Amelia stepping out of the elevator in white tennis shoes and a bulky, light-coloured coat (the jeans she wore were – had been – Paul’s), glancing at the front desk, at the receptionist’s head, tilted almost comically to the side, and her own face bore an enigmatic, inscrutable expression. She sat for a moment beside the useless fountain and ran her fingers over her head, exploring her skull like an unknown country, a lunar surface. Retied a shoelace that hadn’t come undone, looked down the hall and at the sleeping man for a while. And then, finally, Amelia Dehr stood up and left the hotel, did not turn around, never turned back.

  Now he was being scolded for having called for no reason, for crying wolf, and wasting the time of the city’s finest. This was how things were – the reality of Paul’s station in society – in this country: no matter what had happened, something was always his fault. But Paul was far too devastated right then, and too enraged, to think about that. Injustice was interchangeable with the fact of Amelia Dehr. Amelia Dehr who hadn’t been kidnapped, or murdered, but had very simply left, in the only way she knew, left definitively, and he (the animal in him) believed he would die of it. He had ended up on the landing of Albers’s apartment; he didn’t even have the strength to ring, he’d just curled up on the doormat, and in the morning when she’d opened her door he’d tumbled in like a dog nearly frozen dead.

  He’d looked for signs, some sort of explanation: maybe she’d never loved him; maybe, from the beginning, she’d taken him for a fool. But his pride told him he couldn’t have been that blind, couldn’t have deluded himself that much. He looked at the photo of Albers and Nadia Dehr above the fireplace, saw at last how Amelia Dehr mirrored her mother – it took an act of extreme cruelty for the family resemblance between them to become clear. At Albers’s, he had read Nadia Dehr’s first collection, the cradle of documentary poetry – a thin volume titled Life L that left him unsure whether the L was a Roman numeral or a Latin letter – a book written on multiple continents, in cars and in garrets and under trees. Who knew what remained, in the lines, between the lines, of the movements, of the lost landscapes of the sixties and the seventies – whatever there was, it wasn’t what he had been looking for. He was looking for the smoking gun, and he ended up finding it. Amid a welter of horrors, several lines of verse (was this even poetry?) that, to him, in the state he was in, seemed more horrific than anything:

  this boy is charming, he could be

  perfect

  he could be perfect for us – if only someone,

  before us, had been kind enough,

  willing enough

  to break his heart – he would have been perfect

  for us if only

  if only someone had done him the favour done us

  but at this moment, at moment M, in this life, in life L

  we can break his heart

  we and nobody else

  and thereby

  make him perfect

  perfect for us

  of course that means

  (everything comes at a price)

  forsaking him

  forever

  And whether we included Nadia Dehr and her ego, or Nadia Dehr and her madness, or Nadia Dehr and Anton Albers who at that time shared everything equally, the world and the people they met; or even, who knows, Nadia Dehr and the daughter she didn’t have yet, who would be born years later, remained an open question for Paul, an emptiness he sometimes ventured into when he needed a respite, in hopes that intellectual work might distract him; which, of course, it always failed to do.

  Some time after she left, Amelia tried to call him. Only the hope of receiving some sign from her had kept him going; but it was too little, too late. When he picked up and heard, after a pause, after an exhalation he immediately recognised as hers, his name in her voice, Paul – hesitantly, ashamedly, sadly – all the love he still had for her, or thought he still had for her, had immediately turned into hatred. He had hung up. After that, she had written him emails every so often that he deleted without opening, and one or two letters had arrived at Albers’s that he had contemplated in dread, like something altogether disgusting, a bloody organ. He hadn’t touched them, and he didn’t even want to know whether Amelia had stopped writing to him, or Anton had stopped informing him of the letters. He kept his distance. Avoided Albers’s apartment, politely turned down her invitations, kept going to her lectures but sat elsewhere in the lecture hall, and while he set his mind even more determinedly to his studies, his focus was now on practi
calities: materials, costs, the complex question of cost-effectiveness underlying site development and profitability. He set aside philosophy, ideals, and even ideas themselves. Abandoned museums. Never returned to the hotel, took on security stints elsewhere. Nothing else to do now, he sometimes thought, just surveillance. Monitoring things, people, places. Sometimes in a uniform, sometimes with a dog or a baton, in warehouses containing valuable goods, in huge underground garages, in empty offices that by day produced some intangible, barely comprehensible value; solitary, nocturnal jobs meant for healthy young men, and assigned based on their physical strength but also on the colour of their skin, in spaces that were somewhat dark and dangerous, places they patrolled as their footsteps echoed, as their watchdogs panted, reduced to a strange expression of their usefulness: a man in an empty place. He went home more frequently to see his father, who did not talk about the present or the past, who did not talk, pure and simple. Sometimes he went with him to construction sites, knocked down walls, his hair and eyebrows caked in white dust; but as soon as he started doing better (as soon as he started hating Amelia Dehr, whose name he would only utter in front of his father many years later, on a boat drifting in the Pacific), the man he owed his life to refused his company, and Paul understood that he didn’t like working with him nearby, had only tolerated his presence owing to the unacknowledged, extenuating circumstances. Fundamentally, he was modest, and he disliked doing what he did in front of his son. He didn’t need a witness, an audience to be who he was. Paul went back to university. He had sex (he would never say fuck; her use of that word had banned it from his lips forever) as much as he could – mechanically, maliciously, for his ego and for his health, to put as many bodies as he could between himself and her, between himself and the man he’d been with her. He finished his classes, he grew detached, mercenary, he became who he would be known as – the windows guy – he earned money, more and more. Time passed, more and more – but this stretch, and his defences, and his own reservations, all immediately went up in smoke when he heard Albers say that Amelia was back. And that she was asleep.

  Of course, they saw each other again. He was hoping he would find her ugly. And yet he was relieved to recognise her – to recognise what he had loved of her, even if she had changed, undeniably so; they were now at the age when a man is still young and a woman young but still. She no longer stood quite so straight, her neck and her hips now tilted at slightly altered angles, more sinuous, almost interrogatory; even her nose wasn’t as straight as he remembered, its slope a little imperfect. She was wearing men’s jeans, cut right above the ankle; a white tank top; no jewellery except, just above her elbow, a thin gold armlet; several loops coiled around her biceps ended in a serpent’s head with two white stones for eyes. Flat sandals, three pale leather straps that by some magic stayed on her foot. Hair that was neither long nor short, or rather both long and short; silky, soft, almost weightless strands, which seemed to cling by the same sort of magic to her head, a cut that was both masculine and feminine, or rather masculine first and, upon reflection, wildly feminine, fiery. No make-up. No bra. At her neck – where age really could be seen, where the future really could be read in the lines of a life making and unmaking itself – were two new grooves, one deeper than the other, which she did nothing to hide. Too thin, probably. She had that particular pallid glow that results from malnutrition, anxiety was gnawing at her bones and making itself visible despite her attempts to mask it. She had gained in photogenic quality what she had lost in iron, in vitamins, her feet were trembling, her hands were trembling, and she didn’t realise it. Her knuckles were reddish, as if she had been too cold for too long. Her smile was sincere, but sincerely sad, and Paul understood that sincerity and sadness were now one and the same for her. It seemed she no longer had anything of the twenty-year-old firebrand he had had kissed too many times to count, none of which he could recall. She had forgotten the city, she hesitated at intersections, he had to guide her now. Nothing remained of her old toughness, her old self-assurance. It was the other way around for Paul. It was new for him, he had been ready for everything but the fragility, the precarity evident in every aspect of her, as if the least footstep, the least word demanded infinite energy from her. He didn’t want to add to her suffering. He knew he was capable of it but couldn’t make himself do so. It seemed to him that something in her was wavering, was on the verge of breaking down. He found himself slowing his pace down to hers, aligning his silences with hers, with a care and concern that he had never felt before. She’s paying with her body for the way she walked out on me, he thought, which comforted him, even if deep down he knew he was granting himself too much importance, that it had nothing to do with that – nothing at all, really – and he didn’t want to acknowledge this, he didn’t want to be let down, for a second time, by Amelia.

  She had left. That was a fact. Without telling him – that was another. She hadn’t known how to do so, words had failed her. If she had told him, she said, her plan would have fallen apart, her willpower would have slipped away. She who played with words, whose thoughts came so easily to her lips, hadn’t found any way to explain her decision. I thought that you would understand, she said. Then: I thought it wouldn’t be that painful. Then: I couldn’t grow attached, I didn’t want to grow attached, it seemed beneath me. I had better things to do than fall in love. Falling in love is no way to live.

  Paul kept silent. Ten years on, he wasn’t suffering any more, he had established causes, consequences, entire hypothetical landscapes as expansive as the world he would go on to explore, and they had ended up being reduced to a single line. She left because she left. A tautology that cancelled out everything, revealed how absurd the very notion of a relationship was, this occasional dream of knowing another person perfectly, of fusing, of achieving transparency. It’s been a long while since I stopped trying to understand, he said, and you don’t owe me anything. If you owed me something that would mean there was still something between us and as far as I can tell there isn’t anything. Anything at all, Amelia. I’m no longer who I used to be and I can’t do anything for you. I don’t want to do anything for you. Oddly enough, that made her laugh. I tried to apologise, she added, don’t you remember? He remembered everything but said no. It seemed easier that way.

  This lie – of having forgotten, of reaching some closure – laid the groundwork for them to meet anew. In a way it was true, there wasn’t anything between them, but in another way it was false – long after all that had happened did happen, something immovable still remained, something impersonal that moved between them, outside them – he dreamed about shattered windows while she actually shattered windows. It could mean something; then again, perhaps it didn’t. Paul tried not to see anything in it. One night he took her to an exclusive party at a hotel that had just opened, a former brothel with obscene patterns on the carpet, red-lit or bluelit or half-lit rooms; young people showering in the open, alone, in groups, endless shameless showers for which they were, had to be, paid; young singers, young actresses staggering, glass in hand; bathtubs full of champagne bottles, except for the one with two eels swimming in it, two long muscular eels, and Amelia sat on the rim and watched them, let three fingers touch the water’s surface. Those fish are obscene, and so is their fate, to be caught barehanded by a chef or his assistant, their heads chopped off with a single blow in front of onlookers, and carved up to be sautéed, flambéed, on a makeshift stove by an up-and-coming cook. How strange it is to consume a being that you’ve seen alive, that might even still be somewhat alive within, in other ways, thinking its wordless, mutinous thoughts, unwilling to surrender, to give in, to understand – in this way victorious even in death. I’m tired, Paul, said Amelia, and he held out his hand, which she considered blankly, as if information had trouble moving from her optical nerve to her brain, to her heart, to her red, chapped fingers – she looked at it the way, ten minutes earlier, she had looked at the eel that was now continuing its indeterminate existenc
e in Paul’s stomach, in the stomachs of strangers already making their way elsewhere, disseminating the dead creature throughout the rooms, the building, the city; and whether that added to its inchoate strength or diluted it he wasn’t entirely sure. Finally, she took his hand.