Hand Me Down World

by Lloyd Jones

  I bought the two vases as well. While the shopkeeper wrapped them I poked around in a back room filled largely with electric guitars. There I found the box with the woodcuts. When I placed it on the counter the shopkeeper looked up. The brown eyes that had so enthusiastically endorsed the painting of Rügen began to look concerned. He put his hands on the counter. ‘Is there something wrong? Something I should know?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I told him. There was nothing that he needed to know.

  I left the shop feeling pleased. Some of the indignation I had felt on Ralf’s behalf was gone. In its place was a quiet ambient state of neutrality as I walked up the street, laden, in search of a taxi.

  It is two days later. I’ve had to wait for Ines to leave the apartment on one of her mysterious errands. In the other room I can hear Ralf’s talking book. Without any difficulty I place the painting and the woodcuts back on the wall and the vases on the table behind the sofa and slip out and downstairs to my room. For the next hour I am too restless to sit at my desk. I can’t read. My concentration is all over the place. At some point I hear the cage-lift doors open and bang shut, the telltale footsteps of Ines on the landing, then on the floorboards above. The footsteps trail down to Ralf’s end of the apartment. I’m waiting for them to stop, but they travel past the wall with the woodcuts and the end wall with the painting. Then they travel back—again without pause— all the way up to the kitchen.

  That afternoon it is my turn to take Ralf out to the park. When the time comes I climb the stairs but without any of the earlier excitement. I feel more like a slug returning to its hole in the mud.

  I push on the door. It has been left ajar. The floorboards give me away. Ralf calls across from his corner of the room. He hopes I won’t mind waiting. But he needs a blast of coffee before we go out. So I sit with him to wait for Ines to appear with the tray. That’s when I notice one of the hand-painted vases. Ines has taken it from the table behind the sofa and placed it on the low table between me and Ralf. She means me to see it.

  To make space for the tray she carefully moves the vase to the corner of the table near Ralf. She sets out the cups and the coffee plunger. It is always like this, a painful and methodical process. She delights in the meticulous placement of each cup and saucer and the silver teaspoons and sugar bowl. As if we cannot be trusted with the task of doing it for ourselves. We perch forward—Ralf too, with a dropped lower jaw. She pours his first. Then she pours mine. When she passed the cup to me I did not see anything approaching fear or apprehension or anger, if anything it was a look of shared understanding, which irritated me the more.

  Now came one of those farcical moments where you see the outcome before it has happened and at the same time remain powerless to prevent it. Ralf reaches for the sugar. It is where it is always placed for his convenience. But, of course, the world has been rearranged. He doesn’t know about the vase. When he knocked it the vase pirouetted for a moment—as if it could not make up its mind whether to fall or remain as it was. Then it fell, noisily, smashing over the floor. I saw it happen in slow motion but did nothing to prevent it happening. I remained frozen and perversely committed to the inevitable outcome. Well, Ralf bounced up from his chair. He began to curse himself, his blindness, his clumsiness. Then it dawned. What was the vase doing there on the coffee table? It didn’t usually sit there. ‘Ines?’ he asked. Without any hesitation, much to my surprise, she said it was her fault. She’d put the vase there while she was cleaning the table behind the sofa. She must have forgotten it.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ralf, relieved more than anything.

  I knelt down on the floor to help Ines with the broken pieces. We picked through them on our hands and knees. We would have looked as though we were taking this job very seriously indeed, but the stillness with which we went about it was really our acute awareness of the other. I hadn’t been this close to Ines since ice-skating and that other time in the zoo when the brute cold saw me shift my arm around her. For months on end she had been geographically apart—to Ralf’s left side, upstairs, in the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. But here, on the floor, she was close enough for me to smell her, her shop scent. The top two buttons of her housemaid’s shirt were undone and I could see the pale of her breasts and the shine of her skin. I could feel her heat. I could hear her breath. These observations were like images passing in a window. A horse in a paddock, a lake, a tree, there goes a patch of sky, a flock of starlings over a field of maize—things which on their own don’t amount to much but together contribute to a general feeling of contentment. Well, my itemising of Ines’ attributes, her skin, her fast shallow breaths— they will all have to stand for a blooming of desire.

  The things that had kept us apart—the ceiling, the floorboards, suspicion, fear—all of that fell away as we knelt shoulder to shoulder and worked around the stubborn feet of our blind benefactor. Our sides touched, we breathed in and out with one another. Best of all, and I was sure of this, at least at the time I was, I recognised in Ines my own attempt to delay finding all the broken pieces, which was a desire for things to carry on as they were. All of this without either one of us having uttered so much as a word.

  That night I can’t sleep for all the movement in the apartment above. The light is off but I am very awake. I’ve listened to the shower running. These are the usual last gasps from the world above before silence descends. But then I hear feet trailing along the hall. These are footsteps that don’t want to be heard. I hear the door open on the landing. A few moments later there is a knock on my door. She knocked quietly, but not tentatively, no, that would have meant something else; it’s a quietly confident tap that I understand and so when I opened it there was no excuse me, or polite preliminaries. I was surprised to see she was wearing her maid’s uniform. I hadn’t seen it on her for some time. Why she chose to wear it I have no idea. But I’ve already given that detail more thought than I did at the time. Without a word said she took off her clothes. When I felt her mouth on mine I felt her hunger. I am mindful of Ines as I write this. She won’t approve of me unveiling her before a stranger.

  But I will say this. At night geography is the first thing to disappear. The Ines I knew, the one tottering across Ralf’s apartment with a tea-tray, the Ines with discreet glances, that one was now a stranger. The woman under me arched and fed me into her. She clenched her thighs and she grunted. And where was I in all of this? Part of me was an astonished spectator, pleased and surprised by what I had stumbled upon in the clearing.

  Afterwards we lay back in that narrow bed, Ines with her head resting on my arm. Her leg hooked over mine. A few months earlier I was stepping around her in the kitchen, taking care not to intrude. Now I casually moved my hand to her small warm breast. Just at that moment I doubt there was a happier man alive. It was so nice to lie there in the dark and feel fortunate without thinking how this intimacy had been won or arrived at or what would happen next. Actually, what happened next was quite straightforward. Ines announced she was hungry, and just like that we got up and dressed. Ines snuck upstairs to get her coat.

  As we left the building I dropped youthfully down the front entrance steps into the waiting night where everything else felt new. The air. The trees. The neighbourhood. Not a word was said about the accident with the vase.

  And Ines? When I think back I see a side of her that I didn’t dwell on at the time. It was as I pulled out of her. Her face went blank as a sheet. As though any capacity for emotion had been rolled out of her face. She could offer only eye, nose, mouth. Though later as we closed the gate outside Ralf’s she did smile up at me. And further along the street she did reach up and kiss me.

  We caught the U near the zoo. I noticed our faces caught in the window reflection. Mine and a young black woman’s. Who would have thought? Not me, certainly not during the bleak winter months when I had walked the neighour’s dog up to the top of the Mt Victoria lookout, and there, under the weathered bust of the arctic explorer Robert Peary, man and dog had leant in
to the teeth of a filthy gale. Ines waved back at my smile in the window. We ended up at a rotisserie chicken place near the Kreuzberg canal. I thought it was a long way to come. But then I saw its value. That is, I saw it how Ines did. Two euros for half a chicken. I paid for two half-chickens. We stood up at a counter to eat. The skin was crusted with salt. Ines licked at it with a wordless relish. When she caught me watching her, her jaws stopped moving, however, her teeth remained stuck in the white flesh. After that, she nibbled at the chicken pretending it was corn.

  On our way home we walked as we had earlier, side by side, completely at ease with each other. There was just us. Us was a whole new idea. We found ourselves following the canal. She held my hand. We stopped to admire the white swans gliding out from under the bridges; funnily enough the woodcuts entered my thoughts, but then Ines pressed my hand and the thought departed.

  By the time we reached the zoo end of Tiergarten I was nearly falling over with tiredness. It was a relief to turn into Ralf’s street. I thumped up the stairs on heavy legs, by now very keen on the idea of bed. Secretly I hoped Ines would carry on up to the next landing. That’s how tired I was. Instead she came to my door as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if this is what we had done every night these past weeks and months. When we undressed and got into bed it was baffling to think that there had been a time when we slept in separate beds, so thoroughly did this new arrangement eclipse the old chaste one. Ines turned on her side. I lay on my back. I thought about telling her how I liked to follow her feet across the ceiling. Instead, something unrehearsed and completely different came out.

  I said, ‘Ines, why have you been taking Ralf’s things?’

  She turned over onto her back. I propped myself onto an elbow and stroked her bare shoulder.

  ‘Ines?’ I asked.

  ‘For money,’ she answered. There she seemed prepared to leave it, as if that explanation was reasonable enough, and surely I understood as much. But I pressed her further.

  Why, I asked, did she need money so much that she had to steal?

  This time she rolled away from under my stroking hand, onto her side, and shifted closer to the wall.

  A few seconds later she sleepily answered. ‘To pay a lawyer.’ She yawned back at the wall. ‘To process my residency application,’ she said.

  Why not ask Ralf for his help? Ralf knew a lot of people. I also knew how much he depended on Ines.

  She sat up, and pulled the sheet to herself. In the dark her eyes were whiter than ever.

  ‘You must not say a word about the lawyer to him. Promise,’ she said. And when I didn’t answer quickly enough her hand shook my shoulder. ‘Promise.’

  ‘Ok,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  And because my mumbled reply mustn’t have convinced there was a fresh round of promises to agree to. It was her secret and she wished to keep it that way. She did not want the ‘authorities’ involved. She did not want to worry Ralf. She needed to do this thing on her own. It was complicated. There was a risk she would be deported. I wasn’t to say a word to him. It was a private matter. I should respect her. And because I didn’t reply straightaway she added that I ought to understand because I had private matters that she knew I wouldn’t want discussed with the blind gentleman, and as she said that, in an instant—just as it is said of someone caught in death’s spiral where their entire life rushes past their eyes—I saw my life in Berlin flash by, the dissolution of everything, the loss of Ines, and the hard, stinging criticism that would surely come from Ralf. And, as it also seemed, there was not just me standing at the window farewelling that life. Ines was also there, by my side, so that the threat passed silently between us, unsaid but acknowledged. And when the woodcuts disappeared for the second time shortly afterwards I didn’t pursue the matter.

  For several weeks Ines came to my bed every night. The arrangement wasn’t entirely satisfactory. She couldn’t sleep for keeping an ear open to upstairs. Ralf was in the habit of waking in the night. He could manage on his own to the bathroom. But further afield, to the kitchen, say, he needed Ines’ help.

  So we changed the arrangement. At a late hour when I was sure Ralf was asleep I let myself into the apartment and crept along the floorboards to Ines’ room.

  During the day when the creature assembled, Ines would be frustratingly near, but the old man’s crusty chin was in the way, and his pink hanging ear lobe more noticeable than ever, more intrusive, bordering on offensive. I thought I detected an inward change in Ralf. His face was as closed as a paper clip. His silences were drawn out. I wondered what he made of the lighter spirits around him? We didn’t quite hold hands, but our shoulders touched. Then I would notice the stillness of Ralf’s head. There was awareness. Memory was ticking over, catching up.

  Rain has forced us inside the aquarium. Here we stand before the endless varieties. It is like describing carpet. Yet one of the tanks contains an extraordinary creature dredged up from the permanent night that exists at great oceanic depth.

  Organs and tissue float and drift on the end of cords attached to a parachute of more tissue. When it pulls down on the cords the parachute propels it upwards. The moment it achieves equilibrium it begins its descent—which is almost a collapse of will—before regathering itself to begin the exercise all over again. The cords are long and spaghetti-like and wrap around one another. Entangled and untangling. It seemed less an organism than a quest to stay aloft and find form.

  As I passed this on to Ralf, it might have been a description of our little household as well.

  One night I have gotten up for a pee. Outside Ines’ room I stop and stare into the dark of the hall. Something is shambling towards me. The light from the far windows caught Ralf’s blind face. Perhaps he’d heard noises and was coming to investigate. In his hand he held a pair of long-bladed scissors. We are no more than twenty paces from one another, Ralf in his striped pyjamas, and me, naked as I have never been in his company. In Ralf I am reminded of the ostrich we saw at the zoo at the start of the winter. That is how Ralf looked, as if he expected the attack to come from behind. I waited and he waited and then at last the old man turned and passed out of the light from the window and into the far shadows at his end of the hall.

  I told Ines, which turned out to be a mistake because that night was also the last time I stayed in her room. After that I was reliant on her tiptoeing down the stairs to my door. Whether she turned up or not was entirely up to her. The visits became more sporadic, then dished out in a system of rewards for my silence, my complicity, and later, money.

  seventeen

  More things disappeared from Ralf’s apartment. The silverware— all of it except three sets of knives, forks and spoons—the pewter beer mugs that used to line the cabinet inside the entrance, and that was just the start. I made another trip to the second-hand goods shop intending to buy everything back. But Ines had found another outlet. The shopkeeper who was so welcoming when I first came in looked almost bereft to see me walk out without buying anything.

  I told Ines I would give her money, but she had to stop taking the old man’s things. It would be my contribution to her residency application. She asked for three hundred euros, then five hundred euros. Two weeks later she knocked on my door to ask for more. I couldn’t understand where all the money was going. ‘Who is this lawyer?’ I asked her one day. ‘Would you like me to come along with you to his office? It might help.’

  She didn’t like that idea at all. She said I didn’t understand. It was complex. I told her I didn’t have another euro on me. It would have to wait.

  That night there was a knock on my door. I welcomed her back into my bed. It was like old times. She was as giving as she had been the first time.

  A week later, having parted with another eight hundred euros, I came to my senses. Enough was enough. One night she came downstairs. I met her at the door filled with resolve. Or so I thought. She wore just her maid’s shirt, the lavender one, and nothing else. Nothing at a
ll. She pushed me back towards the bed. I told her I had no more money to give, which happened to be partially true.

  I needed to be careful. I was spending more than I had budgeted. I had stretched out my stay longer than originally planned. My workmates back home were kind. Kenny Stewart, who had joined Fisheries when I did and who knew all about my ‘domestic situation’, had written a thoughtful email telling me to take whatever time I needed. This was back in February. I would be on half pay until June and after that it would be considered leave without pay.

  Ines took this news well. She acted as if money was the furthest thing from her mind. She walked me back to the bed and we made love with all the old urgency.

  Lamp shades, two more paintings, books, silver goblets Ralf said his father had left him—all of it went. Ines behaved like a wronged woman. I began to make lists of things so I would notice the moment they went missing.

  Whenever people ask me what it is like down there I think of the great lonely white continent spilling into the Ross Sea, and the tremendous bulge of the Southern Ocean, its massive swells ballooning by the gunwale, and an overhanging sky that appears as a ragged survivor of some unsighted storm in another region. When I returned from my first trip and spoke about my experiences I also heard news about crewmen with knife wounds helicoptered off fishing vessels. So no surprise that my audiences wondered, their eyes lighting up at the thought of the overheated confinement of the cabin, if there had been violence. I learned to direct my smile into neutral space and that ambiguity seemed to satisfy. The fact is I didn’t witness a single blow or see a knife used for any other purpose than to fillet a fish. Once the sea ice broke and we nosed our way through the cracks in the white sheet ice there was no time to think or act or do anything other than haul up toothfish and catch snatches of fitful sleep. There is no night at that time of year, and so the days were impossibly long. My more persistent audiences would nod to get that unpleasant fact out the way. There was no disguising their disappointment when told that no one had been cut or hung over the gunwale by their feet. In the few moments I had to myself, I lay in my bunk mentally composing letters so others might see what I saw. But as soon as I began trying to describe this mystical world I would find myself going on about the toothfish. It had become the easy vessel of all that was strange and new.