44
Sometime during the night, he came back like somebody arriving on a delayed train. It must have been around three in the morning because the station was quiet now. A reduced line of taxis waiting at the side entrance for the final latecomers. She was asleep. The door made no sound as it closed behind him, not even a click. He waited for a moment with his back to the door, then he stepped into the room and stood by the window for a while. The curtains had been left open.
How did she not wake up?
His presence should have entered her sleep and made her want to sit up and tell him to lie beside her, place her head on his shoulder and wait till morning to speak. He turned to look at her lying on the bed, breathing quietly, her eyes closed, facing the door. Who was she now, with no smile and nothing to say? Her mouth trapped in the silence of a photograph. One word from him would have brought them back together, but he continued watching her like a stranger in the room.
Without the consent of her eyes.
He picked me up from the bed beside her. Her most precious possession. He held the open pages up to the yellow light coming in from the train station. It was as though he had taken her hand to read her fortune lines. He took his time examining the map at the back in the same keyhole manner with which he had watched her face without her knowledge. Like a thief going through her things, searching for information he did not have the courage to ask her for directly.
What was he thinking? Did the thought cross his mind, as he studied the map, to go and find whatever was buried out there without telling her? Is that the kind of man he was, ready to steal from her? Like all men, robbing little pieces of treasure to file away in their heads. He had already hacked into her phone. He had read all her messages. He was clever enough not to reveal it, but it was clear, even to her, that he knew too much.
Why had he not asked more questions?
Walking out of the restaurant had been an admission of his knowledge. Instead of speaking about his suspicions, he had held on to them as if they were his companions, his armoury, the evidence he would present in some eventual courtroom where he would put her on trial.
Once, on a call from Iowa, he had almost given himself away, reminding her that she had left her keys behind at the studio. She asked him how he knew that and he said he was guessing. He loved her so much that he could read her mind.
He was collecting facts he didn’t want to know. The pain of finding things out made him feel stronger, as though each piece of proof gave him more and more power. He was like a man with a hunch for negatives, a man who wanted to hear the bad news in every agonizing detail. The more he found out, the more he sank into that fortress of self-pity. One time he’d stopped along the road outside Iowa City and sat crying for an hour with a Subway sandwich that he had just bought untouched on the passenger seat beside him. He could not eat. He could not drive. He spilled his heart out to one of his friends on the phone, listing off the things he had discovered about her. His technical abilities as a forensic analyst allowed him to be present at each encounter she had with Armin. He was a witness to his own worst fears.
He decided to place me back down on the bed beside her, perhaps knowing I was worthless without her.
He picked up his laptop and placed it into his case. He took his passport from the bedside table and must have felt her breath like a feather crossing his hand. Without switching on the light in the bathroom, he tapped with the fingers of a blind man for his toothbrush. He paused to look around the room, making sure he was not leaving anything behind, taking everything from her that belonged to him. She turned in her sleep to face the window. She spoke a word from inside a dream that was not clear enough to take hold. He retreated backwards to the door and let himself out.
In the morning she woke up to find his things were gone and sent him a message – why didn’t you wake me?
There was no reply.
She waited for him at breakfast, on the off-chance that he might appear, wondering where he had gone to. What streets had he walked through and had he got lost – is that what had kept him out all night? Every time the door opened, she looked up with a smile that faded again almost instantly. He didn’t come. She went to the reception and discovered he had already checked out. The room had been paid for.
It was cold. She went back to get her coat from the restaurant. She picked the wrong street. In the light of day, everything seemed to have turned around. She had to check the street sign to find out that she was right after all, that she only had to go on with more conviction to where the failed dinner had taken place. A cyclist came flying past her with a shout right in her face. She jumped back. She had stepped out like a blind tourist into the cycle lane.
They were getting the restaurant ready for lunch by the time she got there. A delivery of vegetables had just arrived and there was a man with a trolley of carrots and cauliflower entering backwards. The same waiter from the night before came to speak to her at the door. She wanted to pay, but the waiter said her husband had already done that. Last night, the waiter said, he came back just before we were closing. He paid by card. He left a generous tip. Your husband, the waiter said, had only just gone again when we realized that you had left your coat behind. The waiter told her he’d run back to get the coat, then dashed up the street, around the corner – your husband was gone out of sight.
There was a sadness in the waiter’s eyes. It appeared as though he had done his best to fix their disagreement, running as far as the main street to put things right. She smiled and said thanks. That gave him some hope.
Prego, he said as he helped her on with the coat.
She went to a café and sat staring at the pedestrians passing by. The sound of the staff making coffee, knocking the espresso cylinder, switching on the steam, was a comfort at first, then it became a shock that brought her back to reality. She checked her phone again. She left a final message –
Mike, where are you? Are you at the airport now? I went to the restaurant to get my coat. They said you had been there. You’re making me cry, Mike. I’m here in a café on Friedrichstrasse and I can hardly see the coffee in front of me.
Twenty minutes later she received a single message back. The message contained her flight details to Bucharest. He would be waiting for her there – we can do this, Lena. We can be happy. It’s your call.
45
We travelled a while by train. Not much longer than an hour. The announcements were made in both Polish and German. We got off at a station that seemed quite rural, somewhere on the outskirts of a town, perhaps. Nothing but the sound of birds. A gust of wind in the leaves. The voices of other passengers who got off at the same station – a group of schoolboys with their Scout leader, an elderly couple and three young women returning from the city. At the end of the platform, a man wearing sunglasses got off and stood at the shelter examining the timetable.
The station house with its waiting room and café had long been closed down and boarded up. All that remained of that service was a ticket machine and a line of waiting taxis. The three women were the first to get there and they sped off in the direction of the town. Lena spoke to the second driver. We passed by the troop of schoolboys walking in single file and drove along straight roads lined with trees on both sides. Every now and again we passed by those road signs where a graphic car is seen crashing into a graphic tree with exclamation marks.
The taxi dropped us off at the edge of a forest. When it drove away, we were left with the horizontal depth in the trees all around us. The screech of a jay could be heard, the bird children call the forest policeman. There was no other sound apart from their footsteps along the sandy path, two people in unison, not speaking a word. Nothing to add to the interior of the forest but more silence.
It was only when we got a bit further into that expanding silence that Lena began to wonder if they were alone. A car door was heard closing behind them on the road. Perhaps it was
another taxi. Somebody else being delivered to this remote place for no apparent reason. Once the car drove away and the silence was restored, the emptiness seemed to hold the presence of an unidentified watcher, like the eyes of a predator keeping them in sight without ever showing up.
Lena turned around several times.
Are we being followed? she asked.
She answered her own question with a laugh. It was nothing but her imagination, she said. Coming from such an overcrowded city as New York, she must have found it difficult to believe a place could be so empty of human beings. They continued walking and came to a clearance in the trees with a set of stables and a paddock. The neighing of horses produced an echo of other horses further away. Lena stood at the fence and her hand reached into her bag.
Let’s give them an apple, she said.
She threw the apple, but it bounced off one of the horses and she laughed at her own clumsiness while they took fright, galloping away as though it was a stone that had been hurled at them. They made a circle around the paddock and came back cautiously to watch.
She was waiting for one of them to find the apple. Waiting for the crack of it inside the mouth of a horse, the ungainly brown teeth crunching sideways, trying to hold on to all that sweetness spilling across the lips. But the horses took no notice of the apple at their feet.
Come on, Lena said to the horses. What’s wrong with you. It’s a nice apple.
They don’t know it’s an apple, Armin said.
Before he could join his sister in Amsterdam, Armin was having to stay in Berlin while he got a clearance letter to board international flights. In the meantime, he was busy with logistics, in touch with tour promoters, arranging accommodation and flights, shipping the equipment to Holland by road.
They continued walking deeper into the forest. At one point they stopped to eat a pastry. Along the side of the path, the earth had been dug up by wild boars. Lena said it looked as though the ground had been ploughed by a tractor. How many wild boars did it take to do all that work? The earth was still fresh, turned during the night, maybe that morning at dawn.
When they moved on again, Lena once more felt they were being followed, and this time she turned suddenly to face the unseen stalker.
Mike, she called. Is that you?
There was no answer. She told Armin that she must be going crazy. You could be on a street full of people and not ever think you were being followed or even looked at. Why, in a place so empty and unpopulated, is there always such an illusion of the invisible?
Call him, Armin said.
On his phone, you mean?
She wanted this landscape of trees to remain honest. She took out her phone and made the call. There was no answer. No reciprocal ringtone in the still interior of the forest drawing him out like a man exposed. The trees held on to what was imagined.
What am I doing? she said. He’s in mid-air, on a flight to Romania by now.
A while later, they left the forest and found themselves in the open. They came to an industrial pig farm. A series of long single-storey buildings with no windows. There seemed to be nobody around. Only the noise of a thousand pigs, maybe many thousands more, inside those barracks. They seemed to be there on their own, rearing themselves in this remote place without any human intervention, feeding from containers of food that were filled on demand, drinking from automated water troughs. Their pink faces looking up to see if anyone would visit them, like a hall full of children waiting for their mothers and fathers. They were grunting and squealing among themselves, communicating with each other in large separated pens, unaware that there was a world outside with daylight, sunshine, air, trees, mud, stray food to be discovered. What if the rumour of such a world were to spread through the crowded pens? How would the news of freedom impact on their contentment?
I think we have this wrong, Lena said.
No, hang on, Armin said.
They stood a while looking over the map, then Armin worked out that the pig production plant had to be a recent addition, built on land that had once belonged to the farm. It replaced a section at the edge of the forest where the religious shrine had once stood. Armin found the path leading away beyond those enormous buildings. They followed it and came eventually to the small river with the footbridge. Once they crossed the bridge, they could see a farmhouse that matched the diagram on the last page.
The farmhouse was boarded up. Weeds had taken over the driveway and there were creepers growing across the steps leading up to the door. Nature beginning to reclaim the farm, rewilding bit by bit the places that had once been kept in such good order. A tractor stood abandoned in the yard, with grass growing around the wheels, a sycamore sapling standing in its path. Other farm machinery parts were scattered around the perimeter. The wooden barns had fallen into disuse. Some of the doors had been left open. Inside were the remains of what had once been pens for cattle and pigs, the troughs and the baskets for hay left empty. A dove scattered from the loft and flew away across the fields.
It was Armin who decided to open the big sliding doors to one of the barns. The swing was still there. The wooden seat was warped and cracked, held in place at a slight angle. The two long ropes were suspended from the frame, over four metres high. They were intact, though frayed. Perhaps they had been replaced at some point over the years.
Lena didn’t trust herself on the swing – she was expecting it to collapse. So Armin decided to have a go. He cautiously sat on the seat and it remained in place. Lena gave him a push and the ropes creaked as though they were under great strain, aching with the lack of use and about to break. As he got more courageous, it must have felt like swinging right out across the fields towards the horizon. Into the bright sunshine where his face lit up and he had to blink. Then back inside to the shade of the barn. Swinging in and out, from darkness into light and back again. The swing released small clouds of fruit flies that had been nesting in the ropes.
Lena stood leaning against the frame of the door with Armin passing her by, going higher and higher. She was looking over the map.
The map had been drawn one afternoon in April of 1933. David Glückstein had come here on his bike from Berlin to visit his fiancée, Angela Kaufmann. The place was vibrant with life then. The cattle were out. Geese and chickens wandering around the inner yard, the dog asleep on the steps of the house. From the barn, David and Angela watched her brother lead the bridled horse back out after lunch to plough the earth.
They spoke about their plans for a wedding. It should be held at the farm, he said, a simple wedding with tables out in the open, under the stars. They spoke about having a family and living in the country. She sat swinging in the doorway of the barn and the air around her was so calm it was almost too much to bear. As if something would give and one of the ropes would break.
Angela watched her future husband move the granite pillar with the sundial aside. There was a stone slab underneath to provide a base. He lifted the slab and began digging the ground underneath with a spade. Once he had dug deep enough, he went inside and came back with a metal box. Angela jumped off the swing and left the two long rope shadows moving on their axis along the floor of the barn. She stood beside him as he placed the metal box into the pit he had dug.
Let’s disown everything but ourselves, he said.
He took his time covering the soil back over again. Finally, he spread out a small sack of sand followed by a bag of pebbles on the surface, like the top layers of a cake. He replaced the stone slab and she helped him move the pillar with the sundial back into position. He pulled a handkerchief out to clean his hands.
On a warm day in spring of that year when Hitler came to power, they stood by the sundial looking across the field at her brother with the horse. He waved at them and she waved back. The professor then reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the stub of a pencil. It was no longer than a cigarette. Something a
carpenter might have kept tucked over his ear. He opened the blank page at the back. It was the only thing to hand, his copy of Rebellion by Joseph Roth. She had read it and given it back to him that afternoon when he arrived, saying she loved that passage where the barrel organ player was cranking up his melodies and the money came floating down from the windows in the Berlin courtyards.
With the stub of his pencil, he drew a map of the place where he had concealed the metal box. He drew it not so much to provide directions back to that exact location but to keep this day from disappearing. No matter what happened, no matter where they might go or be taken, this slow afternoon in the country would be preserved in a simple map. It was drawn without any recognizable geographical markings, to be deciphered only by insiders, by those who knew how much they loved each other. He stood with his shoulder against the doorway of the barn to get the angles right. The lines remained faithful to that afternoon, down to the slope of sunlight. He included only those features that were relevant to them – the sundial, the twin rope lines of the swing, the barns, the farmhouse, the religious shrine, the forest, the oak tree with the bench underneath. An arrow pointing to the next village, left unnamed. It was a day like no other, in a place like no other, from which they stepped out of sight and left no trace of themselves but a suggestion of the swing moving.
46
The ropes continued creaking. It was early autumn, almost a hundred years later, and the afternoon held a stiffness in the air, like the coming sting of cold weather reaching the nostrils. There was no movement in the fields. The crops had been harvested. The ground was bare apart from the stubble of barley and some crows pecking over the remains. The barns were abandoned.
Lena looked up and said – why is that pillar leaning?
She was referring to the sundial on a granite plinth. Her intuition must have taught her that a sinking stone monument, like the graves in a cemetery, meant the ground underneath had begun to settle with time. She walked towards the sundial and began to move the granite pillar aside. Armin hopped off the swing to help her. Underneath they discovered a stone slab, which they lifted with their fingers to find a dozen or two crawling things racing to get back to darkness. Without a word, Armin walked back into the barn and began searching around, then came back out with a small, half-length potato fork that had become rusted with age. Lena stood aside as he started digging. She took over a while later and continued until the fork hit the sound of metal. The sound echoed around the farm buildings like a piece of luck foretold.
The Pages Page 20