Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  He was a lout and a drunk, no question. Perpetually in the process of sweating out a hangover, only to replenish it shortly after. One night I watched him drink a candle. It had lit us faithfully through aperitifs and dinner and was now lighting us through his demolition of a recent film by a much-lauded American director.

  What do you say, Sévvy? Think these wankers believe they’ve created an “hommage” to Kaurismäki, or are they just hoping everybody somehow missed Man Without a Past? I am thinking my review will just be a list of ways I would like to strangle them. No reasonable person would stop me.

  Then he reached for his whisky glass, but instead took a furious swig from the candle, filling his mouth with molten wax. Then bellowing and bellowing like a freight train, spitting half-solidified globs all over his plate of lemon tart.

  Perhaps, when taken all together, it is obvious why I liked him. He was nothing like myself. I studied to be a journalist, but was too interrogative. One might think this is a good thing, but one would be mistaken. I was the wrong sort of interrogative, unraveling everything in my head until each question became a bundle of loose threads instead of a clean and shining dart. During the interviews I attempted, this bundle of loose threads would ignite into flames—whoomph!—and burn to nothing in a second. I would seize up entirely, having nothing left either to say or to ask. Girl reporter, some inner voice was always ready to condescend.

  Bruno’s questions were clear and direct, proper fléchette questions, and often he felt confident in answering them for himself.

  What is this shit? This is Kieslowski for idiots, that’s what it is.

  How could anyone be so sure of anything? It was beyond me. I thought it very shortsighted—very male, in fact—to be so immune to the terrifying number of variables. But in the same instance it was comforting to be close to.

  There is one particular lakeside place which Chavez especially enjoys to sniff around, where there are some viewfinders set on stands. These do not require any coins to look through, and are capable of being swung around 360 degrees to point at whatever one might want to see up close, though it is rare that I see anyone using them. Of course, it is rare that I see anyone at all, considering the hours of our expeditions, and this is the point.

  Generally, I am content to look at whatever the last viewer was looking at. Generally, this is the building across the lake, which looms several stories above its neighbors in much Churrigueresque frosting. It looks as if it, too, is in exile, as if it has run away from Salamanca and is doing a not-so-good job of remaining inconspicuous. At the fourteenth floor there is a glass atrium which wraps around the building like a mantle and this is always lit, all through the night and darker mornings, though I never see any person standing up there. Now, I sometimes will through the binoculars. Be there now. But whoever might be up there never is.

  Chavez goes about the methodical business of marking everything as his own. When I become disappointed by the building, I search instead for the fleet of pelicans, who move in unison and fish in perfect synchrony, as if they are of clockwork. I imagine beneath the water some interconnected means of propulsion, some shared system of cranks and gears. But I have seen them lift into the air before, separate after all. The orchestration, how they plunge their necks beneath the surface all at once; there must be some purpose for it. It must dazzle the fish.

  Inside the apartment, I free Chavez from his leash in time to catch my laptop ringing. Lotti, the screen tells me. I accept, voice only—since the recent comments about my disheveled appearance, my gamine-style dress, I have pretended my camera is broken. Really it is just stuck over with something that I stuck there myself.

  It is more than my appearance, if I am honest: it is hers, unchanged, and the appearance of my old life there in her background, also unchanged. The view from her window the same as the view I shared with Bruno, though from a slightly different altitude, incorporating a little more sky; we lived two floors below.

  Sévvy? Oh good, I called and called. Debbie Harry wants to say hello—say hello, Debbie Harry—and that she doesn’t want you cavorting with any new cats.

  I have not mentioned Chavez. I think back to the woman on the bench—Lake Lotti, Lotti of the Lake, with the gold-shadowed eyes—and have the cuckoo thought that she might have passed along this information, about my caring for Chavez. (And its reverse—that she perhaps knows the things Lotti knows.)

  We’re not allowed pets in this place, is the only not-crazy thing I find to say aloud.

  Savages, says Lotti. I almost hear her satisfied frowning.

  Chavez puts his muzzle into his empty food bowl and scrapes it across the floor towards me with a low, imploring groan.

  What’s going on back there?

  Water heater, I lie, stopping the bowl under my shoe.

  That reminds me, Lotti says. The architecture students? They have been complaining of a draft. Should I send Ramon? Ramon is so expensive, I know, but reliable. Also, the students have rigged up a few things. Shelves, and some kind of system for a projector, which I don’t think can be removed without some harm to the plaster …

  I tell her that the plaster does not matter. I tell her, please send Ramon, that I will pay Ramon, and that she is a saint for seeing to all this. Then I hastily say goodbye before we can talk about the reason the old apartment is sheltering architecture students, before the conversation can turn Bruno-ward. After closing the laptop I gently reprimand Chavez for his noise, though in truth I am growing to be fond of his noise.

  I was once a great lover of silence, certain silences. In the time when silences were still promises. A hush, I suppose, is the better word for what I loved—a quietness that looks forward to a particular moment but is in no particular hurry to get there.

  Hushes I loved in my old life: during concerts, the hush between the final note and the lowered violin; between the lowered violin and the applause. Between the words of slow, thoughtful speakers. Art galleries in the low season. Snow-filled avenues before the plows swept in. The sweet, confined hush of a long car journey, after one passenger has fallen asleep. Really I mean Bruno; that passenger, those hushes. For the little adventure he was insistent to have, I drove him as far as Paris, from where he would fly. Couriering him like a package, he joked, in the big old boat of a car which I enjoyed far too much to trade it for something more economical, more svelte. Bruno teased me for this environmental atrocity, but he loved this ridiculous car also. Of course he did—it was huge and hungry and it ate up the road like a monster, and aside from him, it was the most ostentatious thing I had to show for myself.

  Between Beaune and Nitry he slept and there was hush, magnificent hush, and then he woke and we argued. Stupid, I said. Arrogant. This Boys’ Own adventure.

  It will be a little guided, as I have already explained, he attempted to reassure me.

  A little guided? I repeated, unsure whether he was playing things down or up, whether it was not guided at all, or if it was in fact the Contiki tour of civil unrest.

  This guide of his was the brother of an old friend from Ankara, who was now writing articles for an independent paper, published across the border and smuggled in weekly, depending on how safe were the roads. Which sounded to me worse than no guide.

  Why, I demanded, knowing I had already lost, but not content to do so spinelessly. Was he aware that he was not himself a documentarian? That he was merely qualified for talking about the works of other documentarians?

  He sat there silent for once, petulant, hating me to say this but knowing it was true.

  You just enjoy taking pictures, I went on. Also you think you are immune to many real and terrible things. Cirrhosis of the liver, for instance, and bad credit ratings, and now war.

  You are overreacting, he said. It’ll be a … These things happen everywhere. Why leave the house? Might get flattened by a bus. You know the first civilian deaths in any war are those who stand staring mousishly out of their own front doorways? Look it up if you don
’t believe, Séverine.

  But he was telling me this only because it had already been arranged, and flights had been confirmed, and there was nothing in the world I could say which would convince him to cancel plane tickets.

  I remember we stayed overnight in the Hotel Gabriel. We repaired in its lounge, over a bottle of Roussanne. That night we were like new with each other, while at the same time being like two very old people. As if we had snuck away together from the nursing-home prom. We lay there whispering, scheming. What we would do when he returned. A holiday to Lake Bethmale. Bethmale was the lake into which we threw our engagement rings when we decided not to get married (though in the end, we married anyway).

  I was his second wife, his young wife.

  Young enough to still have blemishes, I see, his first wife observed in a letter I should not have read.

  I was thirty-four then. (Not so very young, I had thought, though later I would find cause to revise this.)

  What she was implying, I think, was: young enough to still have children.

  But there wasn’t a child. There was almost a child. There was an almost-child. There was a child, and she almost made it. It has been several years, and there are at once too many and not enough ways to say this.

  When Bruno came into the hospital I put my hand up to his sagging face.

  They’re going to boot me out of the Young Wives’ Club for this, I tried to joke, and he tried to laugh.

  No no no, they’d never. They’d never ever—they’d be lost without your unmatched macramé skills.

  But his face had refused to hold the laugh, and he leaned down and sobbed openly into my hair.

  I still have the stretchmarks she gave me. Something. For some years afterwards, I imagined these marks were encrypted, that there was something I could have done differently or better if I had only understood and deciphered in time. Often, when making love, I would try to hide them with darkness or with sheets, covering up the way my body had failed me, or I had failed my body. But in the hotel, for whatever reason, I allowed them to be seen, to be traced by his thick fingers.

  In the morning tenderness lingered around the margins of a hasty continental breakfast and the madness of Charles de Gaulle. Bruno proceeded on to Istanbul to meet his connection, and I drove alone back to Lyon. Back to the apartment, where Debbie Harry had discovered and emptied all her little cachettes of food, and had also destroyed a few books in retribution for being left behind. Her tiny needle fangs had found their way into some slim volumes from the lower shelf, books I had read in school. I picked up a ravaged edition of Colette (you are being ironic? I asked regarding the teeth marks) and took both destroyer and destroyed to bed. The drive and fending off worry for Bruno had exhausted me, and I read the same line several times before falling asleep with the lamp on.

  I realize I am still scuffing about in the slippers from the Hotel Gabriel. They were intended as disposable, and still I kept them, and brought them over here. Even though I brought so little. I am being sentimental, I know. Sentimental and unhygienic: the soles of these slippers have become very grimy, squashed flat from so many months wedged under my feet. The hotel insignia, once gold, is now the dirty yellow of dried mustard. I must throw them out and buy new ones. I will. Fresh slippers will go on the list. But really I know this will not happen.

  How did those first days pass, in the sudden vacuum caused by the absence of Bruno? I padded about the apartment noiselessly in my hotel slippers (then clean). I fell back into my meeker, meager ways. Even the music I chose to play was without words. I took some guilty pleasure from the quiet, but I kept my phone close by to receive messages. He had arrived safely with Ozgur in Gaziantep. They were consuming much arak. Could I please return his borrowed films to the library, as he was receiving angry emails.

  The situation was not so dire then as now. Or, we did not know it to be. Homs did not yet look like World War Two Warsaw. Or, there had not yet been published the photographs which showed Homs to look like World War Two Warsaw. I worried, yes. But not so terribly, if I am honest.

  Then nothing for several days. And nothing for several more, the hush soured to an awful silence. The loudest silence of our lives, Lotti’s and mine. A week into this silence, Lotti brought her things down from her own apartment to make camp on our couch, so that any news might find the two of us simultaneously. At intervals our phones skittered across the kitchen table, propelled by messages of support from friends. Everyone reverently spelling their words in full, restricting emoji content to cartoon hearts and candles. Stay strong. There is still hope. The messages would cease for a few hours overnight, then resume each morning as people were waking, pausing between bites of breakfast or while waiting for the iron to heat up for their work clothes. Our refrigerator became a miniature container yard filled with bright plastic tubs, meals prepared by neighbors and left discreetly in the hallway outside the door, while inside Lotti and myself filled several ashtrays, brewed a dozen cafetières of strong coffee, and sat up collaborating on our please don’ts and our have mercies in case the media people might want to broadcast them.

  To whom would they be broadcast? Of whom were we pleading mercy? We did not know. There had not yet been any demands, for any things. No demands even for the absence of things: air strikes, sanctions, certain prisoners detained in certain facilities.

  Still we devoted ourselves unreservedly to this pretense of agency. To the fantasy of choice—which words might be the right words. We drank more coffee and read over our appeals gritty-eyed, waiting for the arrival of stipulations that might render them (and ourselves) useful.

  When at last the phone rang, and I answered to a stranger’s voice, the demand was only for dental records.

  These I could have provided from memory:

  Dead upper left incisor. Killed in the line of duty, Bruno would boast. A swift coup bas outside of a nightclub in the Eighteenth. Delivered by a novice director whose debut Bruno had dismissed as flaccid.

  Second lower-right premolar, cracked on an olive pit during a short holiday in Figueres. A split that ran right down below the gum line. This was met with surprisingly good humor, given it was from a Castelvetrano, beloved. Bruno had merely tongued the broken tooth, murmuring that they had brought so much pleasure over the years, he’d be a monster to complain now, and continued through the meal with unfamiliar delicacy.

  A solitary remaining wisdom tooth, lower left, rotated 25 degrees counterclockwise. The other three had been pulled decades earlier. This one held on, but woefully, intermittently giving him trouble.

  It’s pining, he said when it ached. Thinks itself the last of its tribe, poor brute. Better kiss me to make it shut up.

  Yes, I explained such things aloud, if you can believe, if in not quite so many words. As long as I was speaking they would not be able to elaborate on this need for dental records. Lotti, who had been balled up a long time on the couch, not-sleeping, lifted her head and looked at me, dazed. Me, who sounded deranged, I realized in that moment.

  A cough from the detective on the other end of the line.

  Madame …

  Yes, I conceded. Dental records. And hung up to go and search for them.

  Very early one morning I wake from an unpleasant dream, or rather a dream so unreachably pleasant it is unbearable: The phone rings. Yes. Yes, we can meet at Bethmale. I can make all the arrangements. I just have to repair this broken stereoscope.

  Sleep, in some ways, is worse than supermarkets, because I do not know who or what manufactures this experience, or precisely what it is that they want of us.

  I feel with my feet for slippers, finding fur instead of toweling, along with a grunt. Chavez is already there, waiting. I must have been talking in my sleep.

  What highly confidential information did I reveal? I ask him.

  Ouut, he answers, changing the subject.

  Out, it is raining. It has been raining steadily and patiently for some days, and so to save the floors I secure plasti
c sandwich bags around Chavez’s feet in the way I have seen on certain other dogs. He acquiesces to this indignity. I acquiesce to stand with him in the downpour, the streetlight seeping into the wet air, the dark lake applauding. The birds are all elsewhere. Hurry up, I think to Chavez, but he persists to pee on everything, even though the weather makes this futile.

  It is this time that I see for once, looking through the binoculars as rain needles the lake, people on the fourteenth floor of the exiled building. And upon seeing them, I must immediately look away. It is nothing sinister I catch them at, nothing that embarrasses. Just ordinary living that they are displaying up there. A couple, not young. A white-haired man standing the way one stands to watch television news. A slight woman in a blue shirtdress moving back and forth across the room, in and out of frame, as if everything were normal. How is it they cannot know they are so visible? They must know. And so I wonder how it is they can stand it.

  Rain hammers my cheap pharmacy umbrella, as though it has come with urgent news. I pull the leash to dissuade Chavez from some smell he has been captured by, feeling curdled and ill, and we turn for home.

  At the crosswalk—wait, wait, wait—a chubby girl wearing a transparent raincoat over miniature shorts bops her ample behind to music leaking from her headphones, and I feel irritation and then dismay—am I joyless?

  How? They would not tell me how, or could not. Not for certain. Maybe strangled, maybe shot, or stabbed, quite possibly macheted. But then burned. Beyond recognition. And the car he was in. Almost beyond recognition. It had once been a Subaru, and it was rented from the airport. The former Subaru was found on the safe side of the border. The safe side of the border. The safe side of the Turkish border deep in a Turkish forest. They made him drive it there. Not Bruno—the Ankaran friend’s brother, he was driving. Bruno was only the passenger.