If the presence of Hannah Kallenbach had excited me, then a few minutes later, when she closed the curtains, the feeling was replaced by a disappointment, the descent into which was so steep and sudden that it produced a sort of vertigo. I stopped on the pavement, looking down. What’s this? I said. Because there was something on the road. A small creature, hidden almost. A frog! I said, as though it were strange to see a frog, as though it were strange such things as frogs even existed in the world. With slow steps, so as not to frighten it, I approached the frog. But it didn’t move, even when I was standing right next to it. I bent over and touched it with a twig. Get out of here, I said. Go, before you get run over. But the frog just lay there, camouflaged by the dim light on the concrete. I poked it a few times with the stick on its back and on its head but still the frog didn’t flinch. From behind a group of dustbins chained up outside one of the houses came a rustling sound: a dog was lifting its leg on the bins. It was a small dog, black, some kind of terrier, perhaps. That’s disgusting, I said to the dog who looked up at me with a begging expression, wanting something, company perhaps, because when he was done he came over to me and looked down at the frog with his head cocked. Is it a stone? the dog seemed to be saying. It’s grey and round like a pebble. So is it a stone? I leant in and prodded the frog again with the twig. This time the frog dragged itself towards me on its front legs as though there were something wrong with its back legs or its hips. I saw a dink in its back. Oh no, I said, its spine is broken. We should put him out of his misery. But I didn’t have the right implement for it, so in the end I just took an empty pizza box from the chained-up dustbins and slid it under the frog, thinking at least to take it somewhere more peaceful to die, but the moment I lifted the pizza box the frog mobilised itself and leapt off into the night.
That night I slept deeply and had the most exquisite dreams. In the first, I was sitting alone on a balcony somewhere drinking a glass of light red wine whose name, according to the label, was Mazurka, Polonaises. Then somebody sat down on the chair opposite me. Who was it? In the dark I didn’t immediately recognise the face of Belinda Carrots. Excuse me, I said, I’m expecting somebody. But instead of leaving she started crying. What have you done? she said. What have you done with my Mazurka? Then she reached over and I felt certain she was reaching down with her hand to seduce me but the table had become a piano and she was reaching under the keyboard in order – so she said – to feel the underside of the keys. Sometimes when you’re coming at something difficult, she said, it’s easier to come at it from underneath. When you play the underside of the piano, she said, you activate its capacity for feeling. Then she played something very beautiful. In the next dream, which appeared to be an extension of the first, I was asleep in bed – thus far the dream accorded with reality – when I felt someone prodding me. I opened my eyes and found that several people were in my bed, having some kind of dispute. I was lying on my back with my legs open, like a specimen being observed by a team of scientists. Is he a man? a woman was saying. I recognised Hannah Kallenbach as the person speaking. Hmm, said someone else. Hmm … let me see. Hannah Kallenbach said something and everyone laughed. We know that he has a stomach, she said, and lungs, and intestines. But of the many things conceivable about him, we know least about the ones concerning his heart. I could see that they were poking me between my legs and in my abdomen with some kind of stick but I couldn’t feel anything. We know that once he felt differently, she said, but not lately. These days, he mostly feels the same.
Chapter 11
This dog is love and he was
made for love
The infatuation with Hannah Kallenbach did not immediately blossom into the obsession it would become. It began with being asleep or trying to find ways to be asleep. When I woke up I didn’t feel as though I was awake. How can I explain it? It was like jet lag or coming round from an anaesthetic. I’d sleep through my alarm and still be so tired that, having struggled to open my eyes, I myself and everything around me was just pale and lifeless shadows. What’s the matter with me, I’d say to myself. You’re hibernating, Hannah Kallenbach would reply. But am I an animal?
The first thing I’d wake up feeling wasn’t sadness. The second feeling was sadness and wishing to be tired again because I was so tired of being sad. Sometimes I felt so sad that I imagined lying down on the train tracks and going to sleep, if only I’d the energy for it. All morning I’d swing between exhaustion and excruciating sadness, which made my eyes close, one more so than the other. I stared at things. I stood for hours at the window until the brilliance of the sun reflecting off the sea’s surface made it necessary to turn away. I stared out at the tower until its height, or maybe its empty core overlooked by twenty or so half-finished floors – What could a person do in such a space? – issued a morbid invitation, or at least, invited morbid imaginings. I avoided the chaise because I seemed not to sit down so much as collapse into it, and when it slid back it was so comforting just to lie there that I thought I might never get up again. The important thing, I decided, was to stay vertical. My philosophy was to never get comfortable; to sit only on chairs, for example, that would make me want to stand up again.
It was an intimate tiredness, always close by. Wherever I went, at whatever time of day, it accompanied me. The tiredness overwhelmed all desire except itself – the desire to sleep – and the desire to eat, neither of which were real desires, since I never expended enough energy to require either. I woke up in order to eat and when I’d eaten there was nothing left for me to do except lie down again. I would straighten my shoulders and widen my eyes, pulling the skin back from the eyeballs, and try to read, but my eyes just slid down over the words, slumping to the bottom of the page as if they hadn’t the strength to hold themselves up.
In the afternoons following my visit to Hannah Kallenbach, I didn’t immediately, just before dusk – at what photographers call the magic hour when everything goes luminous – go down to the car and start driving. I might have kept up the driving, had it not been for the tiredness. One afternoon, having avoided it for days, weeks, months, even, I opened the piano lid, which took such effort that all my hand had the energy for was a few arpeggios before my wrist collapsed and my fingers began trudging up and down the keys as if sunk to the knuckles in mud. Outside, children were playing on the street. I was slumped over the keyboard. What kind of man goes to sleep with the sun still up, I thought, but I just felt so tired. I think it’s reasonable to be tired sometimes, said Hannah Kallenbach, and my shoulders curled. Descend lower, she said, and I rested my head against the piano, with one cheek against my left hand, which had not moved from the keyboard. You’re nearly there, she said – wherever that was – and I closed my eyes as if to better hear the piano’s inner workings, the wood on metal, the felt on strings. Just for a moment, I told myself. I’ll just close my eyes for a moment, then I’ll be fine. But as soon as I closed my eyes I didn’t feel remotely tired. I felt that odd sexual feeling, that reflex that had something in common with the urge to cry or, since it was in my lower body, the need to pee – like the urge to pee, only more precious somehow. It was a strangely feminine feeling, to feel sexual so deep inside the body, so I tried to ignore it, which of course made it more insistent, and it soon occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t the feeling preventing me from going to sleep but the opposite, that the sleepiness had come to stifle it.
Thereafter the tiredness disappeared, so I resumed the sad and stupid business of driving around, which I’d given up for some time. Where are you going, Mr Field? Hannah Kallenbach would ask. And I’d say, Huh? or, What? or, Who cares? or, letting my sentences trail off, Wait and see, wait and see … I didn’t have an answer to Hannah Kallenbach’s question but I must have been going somewhere important because I’d make an effort with my appearance – an ironed shirt and a clean pair of jeans – then get into the car and drive as if on autopilot, not knowing where I was going yet nonetheless resisting my destination by lingering at tra
ffic lights and turning left at one intersection then right at the next, left and right, right and left, until, having driven around in circles for some time, I’d so thoroughly lost my bearings that when I entered the secretive tree-lined tunnels of Hannah Kallenbach’s suburb, I was genuinely surprised.
Every night I’d park in the same spot and observe the houses around Hannah Kallenbach’s house, whose proximity to one another, like a sequence of numbers or a set of sisters, suggested an association to each other, as though I might, from one house’s story, be able to infer something about the story of the others. At the end of each day, as the sky let go of the last bits of mauve, I’d leave the car and make my way along the street, studying the activities of Hannah Kallenbach’s neighbours. I’d examine how, nightly, from between the large, gold, eagle-topped gates of the house beside hers, a red-lipsticked woman would appear muttering, This way … This way … This way to the long-haired dachshund scuttling – so it appeared to me – like a windswept old wig along the pavement behind her. And passing the next house, a Georgian-style building with a glass addition after Mies van der Rohe appended to one side of it, I’d stop to listen for the man within practising opera somewhere out of sight. And coming to the end of the row, I’d pay attention to the comings and goings of the nun from the old house in whose window, most nights, a large cat positioned itself on a windowsill beside a poster of a lost cat that looked very much like itself.
So it was, that although in one way I didn’t know them at all, in another way, over time, I came to feel that I knew the inhabitants in a peculiarly intimate way. Occasionally I saw the private scenes one hopes to see when one is snooping around in the dark: a woman holding up a pair of panties in her hand, a man with no clothes on switching on the kettle. But mostly the vignettes unfolding inside the houses exposed only the dull activities of domestic life: people cleaning up, people loading washing machines and rearranging things, opening drawers, motioning for each other to see things on computer screens. Even the fragments of conversation which filtered out from the houses were less the intense and meaningful private exchanges I’d imagined people who knew each other well would have when they were alone than repetitions of well-worn phrases like Uh huh or Let’s not argue about that overlaid – as in the rattle of film projectors accompanying old movies – by the tranquil, even-tempered beeps of fax machines and dishwashers finishing up their cycles.
One night, having made my inspection of the row of houses, I went further than I’d gone before and came to the end of the avenue where there was a graveyard, the old kind in which different members of a family are buried together. Dandelions grew between the graves. I walked around looking at the inscriptions on the headstones. It seemed to me that people who loved each other died close together. There was, for instance, a headstone for a wife who had died at forty-six and her husband only a year after. Below the husband’s name were the names of the couple’s children, two of them, who had died forty years later. And then, having run out of space on the main stone, there was a second stone, smaller, on which, on its own, appeared the name of a third daughter. This headstone was not standing upright in the ground but was laid flat over the grave and covered in cling film as if to stop it from being damaged by the weather.
The graveyard was so devoid of life that when I encountered the little black dog I took him at first for a hole in the ground. Despite his sodden pelt, which clung to him, making him look very thin, the dog had a haughty air, as if he wasn’t a stray dog or a feral dog but a lost dog, a beloved pet who’d come apart from his owner. I called the dog to follow me and although I could tell from his demeanour that he’d heard me, because he lifted his ears to receive the call and cocked his head slightly, he just sat there beside the grave as if in obedience to an order to stay.
After that I often encountered the dog on my journeys. If he wasn’t in the graveyard he would be on the verge, lying upturned with his legs splayed in the air, or sitting with a slobbery tennis ball in his mouth which he’d occasionally drop, letting it roll away from him for a while before chasing it. Sometimes, among the sound of my footsteps, I’d hear small rustling sounds, the sounds of a second journey accompanying mine, and a second later the black shape of the dog would appear, darting after a rabbit or a cat. I could tell from his expression that the dog recognised me but whenever I called to him he just lifted his nose as if to catch a scent and looked at me with his little black eyes from behind his overgrown fringe.
Once, having not seen the dog in his usual places, I went looking for him down a path that led from the far end of the graveyard to an alley running behind the row of houses. I hadn’t gone far when I found the dog sitting in front of a fence. He sat in an oddly human pose, coquettish almost, like a small child, with his back legs stretched out in front of him in a Y-shape. It was raining and the dog was staring at the fence growing gradually darker with wet, his body so full of tension that his leg and even his lower jaw trembled. What are you looking at? I said, because the fence was so covered over with ivy that I didn’t immediately see the place, towards the middle, where a section of wood, from age or accumulated rotting, had come away from the wood around it. I tested the wood. It flexed easily and the dog seemed pleased because his tail swept against the ground.
There was a rock in front of the fence, and by putting one foot on the rock I could climb through. So it was that I, who had never thought of doing such a thing, crept into Hannah Kallenbach’s garden like a no-good animal. The perimeter of the property was lined with tall plants – bushes and reeds and medium-height trees – at the far end of which, behind a flowerbed populated by leafy ferns and agapanthus, a light was on, making visible the house looming over the garden. There were two ways to get to it: directly, along the wavy gravel path which crossed the large central lawn; or the long way, circling towards it through the plants, which had the advantage of being both hidden and sheltered (the light drizzle hadn’t penetrated the densely packed foliage) but required one to go down on one’s hands and knees along the ground, which was covered with rancid, wet leaves. I manoeuvred through the darkness like a monkey, feeling that I could see the house without being seen by it. In this way I came right up to the windowsill and stationed myself beneath an unappealing window plant – a succulent with pointy flowers and fleshy leaves.
How can I convey the fondness I felt for that room? Explaining it wasn’t the point. What mattered was just to be near it somehow. So I sat there, dead still, until some time later when, after an hour or so, the curtain shifted and then settled again, leaving a sliver of yellow light exposed. I couldn’t see the peripheries of the room (because the gap between the curtains, as in a peep show, revealed a little, hiding the rest from view) but from what I could see, everything in the room was exactly the same as it had been: the string-bound chair still facing the window, the heavy wooden desk piled with the same arrangement of papers. Even the two spiders I’d seen on my first visit were still dangling from their long legs in the corner of the room. The lamp on Hannah Kallenbach’s desk was angled upwards, towards the painting after Chagall, in which I now saw, hidden among the three figures – the woman, dog and house – a small figure, a very small figure, standing in the doorway of the house. Was it a man? It looked like a man, although I couldn’t be sure because the picture was some distance from me and because his trousers, in the painting’s characteristically sketchy way, had been drawn without a line in the middle so they looked like a skirt. Whereas the other characters in the picture were looking sideways, to the left and right over the rim of the picture as if at something out of sight (at the larger scene from which the one on the canvas had been extracted), the man, resting one hand against the doorframe, was staring directly ahead, looking out of the picture at me.
When Hannah Kallenbach came in, everything went luminous – first the room, and then everything. She was electric, I thought, the kind of person whose presence is electric, like a man or woman who is either so beautiful or so charismatic that
they light up a room. She crossed the room and sat down, fastening her scarf more tightly around her. It was a red scarf with a tiny silver thread running through it. For a moment nothing happened, then her head turned. What was she looking at? The man who’d just come in. When he sat down, the sliver of room between the curtains hid his face from view but I could see his shoes. They were black shoes, lace-up, sombre, elegant, the kind of shoes an art dealer might wear, or a socialite, or someone who eats at expensive restaurants, but also somehow childlike, since they gaped slightly at the sides like the shoes of a schoolboy too impatient to untie the laces.
The air outside the window was full of creatures, the kind you only hear when it rains, so I pressed my face right up to the glass to hear better. They were making small talk, he asking if she had been well, she returning the question. For me, he complained, there is no doubt that every day things are getting worse. Every day I wake up feeling worse than the day before. Every day I feel certain that today’s the day it’s going to happen. That what will happen? Hannah Kallenbach said. I don’t know … the man said dully. That I’ll vomit or start screaming or run around cutting the hedges naked.
OK, Mr Field Page 9