by Tim Finch
Here’s the thing, then: it wasn’t just any old book. It was, some might say, the book. To those of a certain persuasion at least. The Noble Quran, as the title on the cover described it.
I wasn’t, as it happened, that surprised. Indeed, at the risk of going all mystical – please don’t – once I had decided the package did contain a book, the book I thought it would most likely be was the Koran (to revert to the English rendering I am more familiar with, more comfortable with indeed, strange as that might sound). And that was because by then I was certain who the book was from – a little card dropped out right on cue: Noor.
A small matter first: it wasn’t a birthday card, and the book wasn’t a birthday present. But please don’t think I am feeling sorry for myself. True, there were no other cards or presents left with my bundle of newspapers on this my birthday. But the occasion wasn’t forgotten by my colleagues, who all signed a joint card which they presented to me at teatime, when there was also a small cake with a candle and a mumbled rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.
Of course, the two delegations did not join in. We do not fraternise in this way. And I have no reason to suppose Noor even knew it was my birthday. The little card certainly did not suggest so. The message inside read simply:
Dear Mr Behrends
In hope of peace
Best wishes
Dr Noor
Yet, simple as it was, innocent as it might seem, the message, the gift, above all the sender, begged a lot of questions, all of which started hurtling around inside my head, believe me. A flavour of my initial reaction can be gauged by my physical responses.
First – to go over some of the same ground again – there was the opening of my door; then, the jumping back in shock at seeing the package. This was followed by a sort of tiptoeing back towards the package as I weighed up the bomb/book options in the way I have described at length already. Next, we have the tearing open of the package, with rather a reckless flourish, I might add. Then the book, the note. And to get to the point: what followed was a furtive look, left and right, to see if anyone had witnessed all or any of this, and even a glance up to see if there was CCTV in the corridor. (There wasn’t, which is perhaps a security lapse, but not one at that moment I was greatly concerned about.) Finally, there was the dive back into my suite, which, in line with the cartoonish nature of the episode, had something of the quality of the last of the bathwater disappearing down the plughole, or of a tiny object being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. Left, right, back, slam: I was inside my room again. No one had seen a thing. Phew.
As I say, cartoonish.
Yet as I sat on my bed, with my copy of the noble book on my lap, I felt a sense of profound serenity settle over me. I was centred, still, in the moment and beyond it. Was this the place that Caroline said I would reach if I followed the techniques that she had taught me? Had I suspended my scepticism about letting myself just be? Maybe, though by asking myself the questions I was already lapsing out of it. Still, I didn’t fall prey to ‘What is he up to? What is his game?’ type thoughts. Indeed, I was struck by how tiresome it is to think like this: taking nothing at face value, sifting everything through a fine mesh of suspicion, attributing a base – or at least, an ulterior – motive to all actions. Yes, I am the chair of these peace talks, I said to myself, but I am also a human being, and a fellow human being has reached out to me, first in the churchyard, now by giving me a copy of this book, so precious to him, out of respect, kindness – dare I say it – friendship, so the least I can do is receive it in that spirit. I was so cheered by these thoughts that for a moment I was almost euphoric. Life is good; the world is good; men are good, I found myself thinking. It is not incantation I am generally given to. In my line of work, little evidence is advanced to support it.
And, as I say, the feeling didn’t last. That it didn’t doesn’t matter. Just as it doesn’t matter that I won’t do more than flick through the pages of the Koran. It is not aimed at me, is all I can say, having tried and failed to make any headway with it on a number of previous occasions. What matters is the gesture, the hope, even expectation, that I would appreciate this gift, for the circumstances in which it was given, but more than that, because of who had given it. And if that makes me an old softy, perhaps even a dangerous old softy, so be it.
Noor, of course, gave nothing away all day – in any sense. There wasn’t a glimmer, a flicker. The opposite, in fact. Doubtless, he went extra hard just so I didn’t get the wrong idea – an approach I must say I respected. We broke up early. ‘Gentlemen, I don’t think there’s much prospect of progress in the remaining hour we have scheduled, and it has been a day of intense negotiation, so can I suggest an early adjournment? Please wait in the auditorium until we get clearance to leave.’ I had half an eye on my birthday tea, I will admit. (I had an inkling the team were planning something.) After it, a smaller number joined me in the bar. Then I had dinner with my deputy, Valery. A working dinner.
It wasn’t a late night; we have a long day tomorrow. I put the birthday card on my desk in my suite, next to the never-to-be-opened-again Koran. I had a text message from your brother. It was decent of him to remember, I thought. He never used to before.
DE VRIES IN DEN HERREN
The rich colour must have come from the red wine sauce, the density from the bread dumplings, texture from the cranberries and red cabbage, and the stinging heat from the Hungarian paprika. That at least was my first thought; my gut instinct, as it were. But then I calculated that the wild boar goulash, last night’s main course, could not possibly have worked its way through me so quickly. Despite appearances, what I was confronted with was in fact more likely composed of the previous night’s pike and boiled potatoes, yesterday morning’s Bircher muesli and pastries, and the cold cuts, potato salad, sauerkraut and pickles from the lunchtime buffet – and indeed meals from earlier in the week.
All those who are not German or Austrian among us – and even the younger ones of them – affect to be appalled by the traditional arrangement at the Herren in the Gaststube, whereby the sitter, on rising, is invited to study the result of his exertions, laid out laboratorially, so to speak, on a pristine porcelain shelf. I suspect, however, that I am not alone in allowing myself a moment or two of fascinated inspection. And a moment or two more to relish the stench which, such is its powerful intimacy, calls to mind Dr Freud’s deranging scatomancies – ‘look at me, play with me, love me …’
(I can see the look on your face, by the way. How I love that look. How I love the cry of Ed! You scrunch your nose, shiver in disgust, act as if you are appalled, but you know very well that a love story truthfully told would be as full of shared poos and farts and bottoms and willies, as it would indeed of fuck me harders and suck my dicks and eat my pussys. And don’t Ed! me about those either because I know they really turn you on. Make me wet, oh Jesus, I’m coming, coming … One might almost say true love only exists when two people share without inhibition such baby talk, such dirty talk; when there are no limits to filthy intimacy.)
But enough of this. There! The dry suction on the flush of these toilets is such that even the heaviest of deposits whooshes down and around the bend like a Bond villain imploding out through a broken plane window. All that remains on the shelf is a smear, a smear which annoyingly is never quite cleared by the whirlpool of water that follows. Some scrupulous brushwork with what the Germans call – delightfully, I think – the Klobürste is always required.
I make this observation, I realise, as if toilet-bowl cleaning is common practice among men, whereas in fact there are many who are happy (the word is well chosen) to leave more than a smattering (likewise) of faecal evidence behind. Some remnant of territorial marking? They are contemptuous of the Klobürste, or the squirt of toilet cleanser or air freshener, or a slight plumping of the potpourri, or a wiggling of the reed diffusers in the very smartest establishments, which this, of course, is. Your brother springs to mind. Not Ed! this time but Max!
However, it was not a man of your brother’s type who emerged from a cubicle near the far wall just as I was emerging from the cubicle nearest the exit. That was evident from the look of wild panic in his eyes when he saw me. In-and-out-without-being-seen-leaving-behind-as-little-evidence-of-occupancy-as-possible: this would have been his strategy, as it was mine.
On finding any of the stalls occupied when we entered the Gents, or indeed on hearing other men take up positions while we were in position ourselves, our intention is to outsit these other occupants, however long it takes. Business has still to be done, of course, but our tactic in these circumstances is to sync our exertions with the sonic cover provided by the unabashed actions of these other occupants. And only when we have heard the dry gulp of the flush, the unlocking of the cubicle door, the torrent from the taps and the blast of the hand dryer (once, twice or however many times), do we dare to venture out.
But there is an occupational hazard for our type of man: namely, that we cannot account for others of our type, other surreptitious shitters, as it were, who, hearing no sound where moments before there had been the elephants playing tubas, barrel bombs dropped at low altitude into deep water, and all the rest of it, assume the coast is clear, only to find ourselves approaching the wash basins side by side, faced with just the prospect we had hoped to avoid, its most dreaded element being the requirement to acknowledge each other in some way, to share a pleasantry or two.
By contrast, your brother’s type of man is not only untroubled by such a scenario, he positively relishes it. ‘My word, that’s a load off my mind’ or ‘Good luck to the next man who goes in there.’ Or, more directly, ‘Nothing like a good shit, is there?’ All things I, and maybe this man next to me, might say to you, his wife, in our respective boudoirs of filthy intimacy, but which we wouldn’t dream of saying to another man, in this case, each other, even though – had the situation been only slightly reconfigured – we would have been comfortable enough, flies open, cocks in hand, standing shoulder to shoulder, aiming a steady stream, and perhaps even a thunderous one, into the teardrop urinals. And I have been saying ‘this man’ as if I didn’t know who it was, whereas in fact I did, of course. We are a relatively small team.
De Vries, his name is. A Dutchman. A serious fellow, notably conscientious about his work, even among a notably conscientious team. My team, I thought with fierce affection, despite the excruciating situation. Silky blond hair, feminine almost, though thinning on top, De Vries wears those now rather old-fashioned-looking wire-framed spectacles, which always seem to have the effect of making the eyes of the wearer look tired, rubbed raw, red-rimmed. On the one previous occasion when we had shared a few words unrelated to the talks, he had pointed me in the direction of an almond slice on the teatime buffet table which he said was particularly delicious. We had enjoyed a good session that afternoon; spirits were high. A shard of flaky pastry had adhered to his upper lip, I noted. I might have pointed it out to him, but didn’t, and it remained there – a hanging shard, I thought to myself, apropos of nothing in particular – for several minutes of the after-tea proceedings until, prompted by some sensation, he obliterated it with a moist-tongued cow lick.
Back at the basins it was De Vries who broke the silence. ‘I have been meaning to say for some time,’ he began, apparently casually, though I knew what effort it was costing him to say anything to me in these circumstances. Rather to my surprise he had begun inspecting himself in the subtly lit and outrageously flattering mirror above the basins. Any man with an eye to his appearance would be pleased at what he sees in this mirror – I always marvel at how handsome and distinguished (and young) I look. But De Vries looked pained. Though not, I fancied, by mere surfaces. Indeed, as he removed his wire-framed spectacles and peered more deeply into the glass, it was as if he was looking into his own soul, the anguish therein, the fathomless agony … Though he might just have been examining his blackheads, of course. ‘That I am very sorry for your loss …’
Having allowed myself to be diverted by thoughts of De Vries looking deeply into his soul or examining his blackheads, I was particularly taken aback to hear him say such a thing. The thing, no less. Had he been looking in my direction rather than being absorbed in the various etc., etc., etc., he would have registered the consternation on my face and left it there, perhaps. As it was, he ploughed on – regardless, one might say: ‘I know it was a couple of years ago now …’ He had finished with the mirror and was washing his hands thoroughly, fussily, downright annoyingly, under the laser-activated tap ‘… but I imagine the pain doesn’t lessen to any great extent.’ He withdrew his hands suddenly and shook off what water remained. ‘The thought of being without my Suzy, of losing my Suzy like that …’
He trailed off and I, still shocked, still at a loss as to how to react, was struck first by the fact that his wife was called Suzy – pronounced Soo-zee (oozingly) – a most unlikely, unsuitable, even rather obscene name for the woman in a man like De Vries’s life, I felt. I could imagine him with an Angela or a Marion or even a Theresa, but a Suzy? Categorically, no.
‘Well, it must be terrible,’ De Vries concluded, and before proceeding to the hand dryer and exiting, never again to share more than a couple of words with me, more than likely, he patted me on the shoulder, in a most bathetic gesture of brotherliness.
I stood over the basin for some time after De Vries’s departure. More for something to do than anything else, I splashed water on my face, as if to recover myself. Though I wasn’t feeling particularly emotional. God knows, sometimes a wave of grief overwhelms me. I stagger and bow, heart heaving, legs folding. I have to stop what I am doing, excuse myself, take a break …
But this time was not like that. It was more that I was appalled by De Vries’s … I can think of no other word for it … tactics. He had found himself in an awkward situation, as I have detailed perhaps tiresomely, but, for God’s sake, it was only that I knew he had just been having a shit. That’s all. The top and bottom of it, if you will. What sort of man decides in such circumstances to – excuse me shouting – EXTEND HIS CONDOLENCES. And well beyond the point at which they can be extended without being, I would suggest, actively inappropriate. A man who doesn’t really know me, and certainly didn’t know you, and has no reason, no business, feeling sorry for either us, but who – and this hit me hard – obviously did feel sorry. Or at least, he had imagined what it must be like, and felt the pain of it, or the shadow of the pain of it – that cloud which blocks the sun for a moment – and wanted to communicate that. He had read somewhere that one of the most hurtful things for people who are bereaved is that nobody talks to them about the person they have lost, for fear of causing upset, or saying the wrong thing. That old cliché. That patent untruth.
‘Fuck you!’ I mouthed angrily at the door through which De Vries had passed, out of my life (I could be pretty certain of that after this, after all). ‘Fuck you and fuck Suzy’ – adding, for good measure, the finger, which I had speedily to withdraw, or rather, to convert into some sort of vague, fluttery gesture with my hand – think a magician Abracadabra-ing – as another man, right on cue, entered the washroom.
‘Are you all right, Edvard?’ this other man said. (It doesn’t matter what he is called. He isn’t going to feature again. Though, as his use of my Christian name suggests, he knows me quite well. Much better than De Vries.) I suppose he thought I was in some distress, had been crying even, had for some reason been thinking of you, as if I don’t think of you all the time, as if I am not addressing these thoughts, and all my thoughts, to you constantly, incessantly, never letting you rest, sleep, go …
STOP.
‘I am, François, thank you,’ I replied breezily. (Okay, his name is François. But you didn’t need to know that, or to know any more about him.) ‘In fact, I have just had …’ I paused for effect; I could hardly believe I was going to say this ‘… the most massive dump.’
And with that – it was hugely liberating, I have to
say – I marched out.
TOO MUCH?
You didn’t like that last one very much, I can tell. Perhaps you are right; perhaps it is the sort of tale – for all that it happened to me and could never happen to him – that a man like Max could carry off, but not me.
(I am seeing Max next week, incidentally. In Berlin, for the opening of his new show in the city. Emboldened by the text message he sent to me on my birthday, I invited myself. I will have some meetings while I am there, of course. I was planning to go anyway at some point. A quick circuit of the capitals.)
I wanted to strike a somewhat lighter note, that is all. It is sometimes hard to know how to pitch things, what to include and what to leave out. I don’t know what you will be interested to hear these days. What I can say and what I can’t. The situation is not dissimilar to the days when we were first going out together, first getting to know each other; when we didn’t know each other in fact, at least, not very well – and there were misunderstandings and missteps, often quite trivial, but which could have jeopardised everything and ended it all almost before it began. Each going our own separate ways. Never to have lived and loved. One shudders to think how easily, how carelessly.
I watched a television drama recently in which a couple were having an affair. It’s called The Affair and it has in it that actor who you used to like from The Wire. I can’t remember who recommended it. After a sex scene, we see the young woman in the bathroom, washing her hands. The man comes in, naked, flips up the toilet seat and starts to pee. ‘Too soon?’ he says, seeing the girl’s look of surprise, slight disgust, even alarm.
Sometimes I feel that the ground has shifted back to those early days. I am not sure where I stand. Too soon? Too much?
For one thing, I haven’t heard from you in a while.