Since the man couldn’t be apprehended directly, the only thing I had to go on, apart from his shoes, was his voice. What the hell, what the hell, he said. Do you know what? Last night I found myself at the telephone with the receiver in my hand and no idea who I was trying to call. He had a flat, affectless voice and relayed his complaints in a detached, operational tone, like a professional. The night before, he said, I woke up standing over the dustbin about to urinate. Again he spoke haltingly, as if reading his words off a sheet of paper. I’m lost, he said. Not geographically, of course, I mean I know where I am, but I’m never where I’m meant to be. Sometimes I think the only way I’ll ever get what I want is if I come across it by accident.
After that his voice lowered and became inaudible, but I’d stopped listening anyway because the dog, who must have dug his way under the fence, appeared. Only this time he came right up to where I was sitting and, as is typical of dogs, dug his nose into the seat of my trousers which, since a person is not without sensation in that region, produced a response that was inappropriately sexual. I just want to sit down and think, the man was saying from behind the curtain. Think about what? said Hannah Kallenbach. And he said, Everything. Just everything. Catching hold of the dog by the scruff of his neck, I pushed him away, legs outstretched, belly to the ground, into the bushes. His hair looked wiry but was in fact surprisingly soft to touch. The dog wriggled out of my grasp and darted a few feet back, not because he was afraid but because he thought we were playing a game and was, in this way, enticing me to chase him. We must have made a noise because the window opened. Ssh, said Hannah Kallenbach. There’s someone outside. Her hand appeared at the windowsill. Hello? she said. The man’s hand appeared beside hers, elderly, spotted, protruding from the sleeve of his jacket. Hello? he said. And then, There’s nothing there, or if there is you won’t see it … Fucking foliage.
I stayed beneath the windowsill until the light went off and everything was quiet. The dog, having given up on his game, lay down some distance away and went to sleep. As I left, I don’t know why, I lifted the dog awkwardly – it was like wrenching something up from the ground – and carried him to the fence. At first he struggled but then, tired of resisting, he let himself be carried, albeit stiffly, through the hole in the fence, down the alley to the car, where I opened the door and put him on the passenger seat, manoeuvring his legs into a position which made him look less unwilling to be there. The dog was compliant now, allowing himself to be rearranged, and I allowed myself to believe that he was as comfortable as he now looked. Perhaps he was more at ease, because he let me dry off his fur and each foot with my coat, even his underbody, rubbing the lining over his chest and up along his forearms. What have I done? I said, and the dog looked up at me from the passenger seat as if to say, You’re asking me?
At home, I undressed in the bathroom because, for some reason, I wanted to avoid being seen naked by the dog. I was curious about the man’s relationship to Hannah Kallenbach. There was an intimacy between them, yes, but not a category of intimacy I recognised. I had the idea that they might be colleagues, or have some kind of professional association. What kind of profession I couldn’t say, but I lingered on this possibility anyway to displace other possibilities, like the possibility that they were married. Because you want to be married to me, said Hannah Kallenbach. She seemed to know where I’d been because she said, Was I as you expected? No, I said. Were you disappointed? she said. Yes, I said. What do you want from me? she said. To stay with me? To come away with me on holiday? To live with me in my house?
Then a bolt of lightning struck the metal roof of a house somewhere out of sight, turning the sky bright blue. The storm must have been nearing because it was only a second before the clap of thunder followed. There was another bolt of lightning and a thunderclap, only this time the thunder came more quickly and it didn’t sound like a clap, it sounded like something breaking, like a stone splitting in two, and it was so loud that it sounded twice, first in itself, then in the house’s roof and windows which hummed, reverberating from the vibrations of the pressure it released. Is it true that thunder sucks oxygen from the air? That would explain my sudden light-headedness. The dog looked afraid so I patted the edge of the duvet, inviting him to join me, and he rocked back and forth, preparing to launch himself, and after failing several times to jump high enough to land on the bed, lay down beside it on the floor. There’s no moon, I said, because the clouds were heavy and had covered it over. Then the rain restarted, only this time it was really pelting down, as if the clouds had learnt to let go and now they couldn’t stop. But there was something comforting about the sound of the rain from inside the house, especially since I was in bed and not planning on going anywhere. And in the aftermath of the cruel white light, everything looked warmer – the night sky was luminous, almost yellow, and the walls of the bedroom had turned not yellower, but an uncomfortably bodily colour, something between a rich off-white and a jaundiced cream, like the hue of sallow skin or pus or semen.
Chapter 12
Animal pragmatism
After the power lines came down, life was very slow. Trains stopped and traffic lights became four-way stops. The bay was subjected to a schedule of blackouts during which locals, gathered around candlelit tables, said that electricity was bad and they were better off without it. Progress on the site was non-existent. What’s this? What’s this? What’s this? Touw would shout as he circled the tower on his daily inspections, his voice echoing through the empty floors. Get this out, he’d shout. Get this the hell out of here! Then would come a crash as a dead pigeon or faulty bathroom fitting landed in the middle of the building, a giant dustbin whose contents, I thought, must by now rise so high that you couldn’t see the ground.
The weather reached an equilibrium: clouds settled over the mountaintop and the sea’s surface was taut. In the morning the water seemed impenetrable but by late afternoon two kinds of seaweed started to appear. Days opened up with nothing inside them. The hours seemed huge and far apart. Aside from the window, the dog was my only contact with the outside world. Since I didn’t know his name, I called him Schubert because of his tormented character and because, like Schubert, he had dark curly hair. I tried to train him but his overwhelming attitude was defiance. He’d watch me with that cocked head of his, ascertaining what I wanted from him only in order not to do it. He wouldn’t come when called, wouldn’t fetch a ball and was impossible to take anywhere because he picked fights with other dogs and nipped the heels of passers by. I managed to teach him two basic commands: sit and lie down, though the two instructions seemed linked in his mind so it was not possible for him to lie down from standing nor to sit for more than a few seconds without lying down.
In the evenings, with no electricity and nobody to talk to, I’d leave the house and go driving. I’d assumed that my evening driving routine would taper off. It was hard to watch myself do it. I’d thought that as time passed I’d get tired of going to see Hannah Kallenbach, that putting myself down outside her window, night after night, would become boring. It seemed likely that, as in a story whose sequence of events is always forward-moving, my visits would either progress to some climax or conclusion, or that I, losing interest, would give up and move on. And yet the story of my time with Hannah Kallenbach – because it was a story, and it was a story about time – was impervious to the passing of time. Nothing happened. Perhaps it was the sameness of my visits which made them so compelling. Because unlike in a story where one can never really be lost (since it is always apparent that one is either at the beginning, the middle, etc. from the plot arc or the number of pages remaining), my visits to Hannah Kallenbach were always exactly the same, so that I could return each night to the window and lose myself in its familiar scene precisely because it was never possible to say where I was in relation to the end.
The more I visited Hannah Kallenbach the harder it got to bring my visiting her to an end, because every time I went to see her – taking the same
roads, past the same traffic jams – the further I seemed to embed myself into a routine which had become so habitual and so familiar that it began to seem like the stuff of which my life was constituted. Hannah Kallenbach had disturbed my sense of time: whereas previously time had been structured around going to sleep and waking up (like stories which begin One morning, to give the impression that nothing has gone before), now its arc was strung between my comings and goings to Hannah Kallenbach’s house. Units of time reoriented themselves accordingly. What had previously constituted life now felt like the gaps between life because life was seeing Hannah Kallenbach and everything else was just waiting. Within ten minutes of waking up, in among the thousand useless thoughts a person wakes up with, I had thought of Hannah Kallenbach. By the time I’d brushed my teeth, the thought of her had occurred to me another two or three times so that sometimes I didn’t brush my teeth to avoid thinking of her. The minutes it took to transfer my clothes from the washing basket to the washing machine or to eat breakfast were subtracted from the time remaining until I would see Hannah Kallenbach. The two minutes that passed watching the dog eat his breakfast brought me two minutes closer to seeing Hannah Kallenbach again. All day, whatever I was doing, I was marking time. While I walked between rooms or tried to read or stood around listening to things (like dogs, barking, somewhere on the other side of the street) or lay on the chaise wondering, What will become of me? or leant my head on my hand while waiting for the kettle to boil or adjusted the blanket I wore like a shawl around my shoulders or looked outside at the seagulls clinging to the harbour, or the boats, or the movement of the tops of the trees, or counted the kitchen tiles or stared at my watch until it looked like many black hands were overlaying each other or did nothing but watch a speck of fluff drift by for what seemed like an eternity thinking, So much time has passed, I was always, at the same time, making complex mathematical calculations about time passing and time remaining and where I was in relation to seeing Hannah Kallenbach again. Because where I was was only where I was in relation to her. Nothing else mattered. The only thing that mattered was when would I get to Hannah Kallenbach’s house and when I got there would she be there. The effect of which was that my actual time spent with Hannah Kallenbach (separated by the window) felt meagre, coming felt like going, and my visits soon went from being a source of pleasure to a source of suffering, since no sooner had I sat down outside the window than I’d be worrying about the moment when I’d have to stand up and go back home.
The waiting took up all my energy. I waited by withdrawing energy from everything else. A heavy weight descended on me while I was waiting – the weight of waiting – so that by the time I started driving I was so exhausted that I had to keep myself awake by making a list of things I remembered about the yellow room – the string-bound chairs, mine and hers, the childlike painting by someone after Chagall, the bookshelf with its grand European novels, the mismatched ceramic pots … But my tired mind couldn’t populate the list and remember it at the same time so the items, not wanting to be catalogued, dissolved the moment they were thought about. I’d park and, with heavy legs, make my way down the alley, turning left and right at the fence to check that the neighbours weren’t watching, before climbing cautiously in and making my way as usual through the foliage to my post outside the window.
Sometimes I’d sit for an hour or so, waiting for her beneath the darkened window, and then go home. Other times, as if she’d been waiting for me to come, I’d sit down and almost immediately the light would come on and the curtains would shift, letting me survey the yellow room in which everything – the chairs, the desk, the piled-up papers and ceramic pots – was exactly as I’d left it. Sometimes when the yellow light filled the room I wanted so much to be inside, and was so close to the realisation of that desire, that I felt quite dismal. Other times, when the light came on, I wanted to go home. Not because I didn’t like where I was but because, although nobody had seen me, I felt as though Hannah Kallenbach knew where I was, the consequence of which was that the degree of openness of the curtains took on a special significance. When the gap was wider, as if she’d purposefully left it open for me, the room felt welcoming, but when the curtains were pulled so tightly shut that I could hardly see a thing, the slice of light coming through their frayed edges seemed a rebuke and, ashamed of my skulking around, I wanted to leave. Although I never actually left, because when Hannah Kallenbach came into the yellow room, crossing through the gap between the curtains before sitting down in the chair – her chair – beside the window, the room would light up in a warm and inviting atmosphere. She’s so beautiful, I’d think. Because whereas one tends to forget after a while that a person is beautiful, especially if you see them all the time, Hannah Kallenbach’s beauty presented itself to me over and over again. Every time I saw her I felt a kind of pang. Yes, pang was a good word for it: like young love or immature love or new love, love but with a tragic aspect.
Sometimes, from somewhere out of sight, I’d hear private noises – plates and cutlery, floorboards, a man saying, Ooh, as if hearing something salacious – but I paid them no attention. Sometimes I’d smell dinner cooking but that didn’t interest me either. Even the comings and goings of Hannah Kallenbach’s male visitor, who must have been her husband because he seemed to live there, only interested me insofar as I wished they wouldn’t happen. And some nights, when for some reason the man didn’t come into the room or arrived later than usual – because I liked being alone with her, and because a person’s absence always equates to death – it would occur to me, just for a moment, if I let myself think it, that perhaps he was dead and I wouldn’t have to see him again.
On the evenings when Hannah Kallenbach and the man did sit together, talking, their conversations, from outside, were muffled and it was difficult to make out exactly what was being said. Filtered through the walls of the house, their words led in a number of directions. When the man talked about the fucking crickets, the fucking crickets, he could have been talking about fucking tickets. The middle syllables were more audible than the outer ones so that words like fog could have been dog, deluge sounded like delude, and weight and wait, mist and missed, toupee and to pay were completely interchangeable. The man’s frequent references to a writer could, depending on what my ear liked, equally have referred to a rider. The lack of clarity was confusing, but it left room for fantasy. Sometimes my mishearings were so intriguing that instead of turning my face towards the glass to hear better, I’d turn away as if to help the words lose their shape. I liked the way my ears betrayed me. It liberated the disembodied voices to say what I wanted them to say. Before long my failed attempts to understand went from a source of frustration to one of pleasure. The man’s slow way of speaking, with not much moderation in volume, made it easy to erase him since his voice, so robbed of feeling, suggested (like someone on tranquillisers or reading from a script) that he was anyway not really there. Allowing me, listening to the apparition of a word filtering through the layers of curtain and glass, to hear things, things unrelated to him or his situation, things about myself, so that as I sat outside on the cold flagstones, I was, at the same time, sitting on the string-bound chair in the yellow room. When, after a long silence, Hannah Kallenbach said, You’re deep in thought, it could have been You’re beautiful that she said, and because of the strange changing of places that had occurred, it felt like she was talking to me.
Sometimes when I was driving back late at night, I’d stray onto the wrong side of the road as if forgetting for a moment which country I was in and where was home. The feeling that I was in two places at once infected me at the house too. I’d close the front door and find that sounds coming from outside – a car door closing, a dog crying Awoo-woo from across the street – seemed to be coming from within. The rhyming geometries in the entrance hall were disorienting. It was as though the composition of shapes around me – the tightly spiralled staircase against the zigzag ramp, the vertical stripes of the radiator beneath t
he striated reinforced-glass windows, both overlaid by squares of light coming in through the perforations in the overhead slab – intersected one another in a way that was somehow contradictory and, as in a cubist painting, forced me to occupy several points of view at once.
The dog wasn’t a very sociable character. He refused to be picked up or stroked, preferring to spend his time alone, either sleeping or playing with his tennis ball. But when I returned from Hannah Kallenbach’s house he would always be lying in the entrance hall waiting for me. Worn down by being alone, he wanted to be loved the way a dog is meant to be loved and would greet me with an uncharacteristically solicitous attitude, covering me with licks and offering up his pink underside to be scratched. And I, who liked those moments of closeness, perhaps because of their infrequency, would bend down to stroke him, making ridiculous declarations of love. To which the dog, wriggling his torso and craning his neck round to face me, responded with an appreciation which I just knew – how can I explain it? – was inappropriate. There was something primitive about the way he moved; it was too joyful, too expressive somehow, more than just doggy enthusiasm. He’s just a dog, said Hannah Kallenbach. Dogs are frisky. It’s true, I thought, excitement is different for a dog. A dog’s excitement is not just associated with other dogs. A dog is seduced by anything if the shape is right. Table legs, chairs, a handbag … They are all the same to a dog.
But really what the dog loved most of all was his tennis ball. Whenever I looked for him he would be in one of two places, either upturned in a patch of sun somewhere or standing at the top of the ramp with the tennis ball in his mouth. He carried the ball around constantly. The only thing he loved more than having it between his teeth was dropping it. He didn’t want me to throw the ball for him, preferring to position himself at the top of the ramp where, having opened his mouth, his eyes would accompany the ball’s downward journey until the strain of separation became too great and he would set off after it with a scattering of legs. The dog’s appetite for this game was untiring; he seemed to want it to go on forever. Long after his muscles ought to have grown tired I’d hear him running back and forth along the ramp, casting the ball away and then retrieving it. Part of me thought, How can he play this game so constantly without getting bored or tired? yet on another level his playing made me feel a sort of kinship with him because it expressed something of our own situation, the dog’s and mine, since from the moment I got him I’d been afraid of losing him. The idea of it was so bound up with the dog’s presence that each time I saw him I couldn’t help rehearsing his absence, as though by imagining him not there I might partially master the loss in advance. So that when I watched him going to and fro along the ramp I was also asking myself, How would it feel to stand here and not see him playing with his tennis ball? And when I came home and found the dog waiting for me at the door I was also thinking, What would it be like to come home and not find him waiting for me?
OK, Mr Field Page 10