by Lloyd Jones
I was back on the trains at night, travelling up and down the same line, half hoping I would run into Bernard, half hoping I wouldn’t in case a sleeping passenger suddenly pulled a hat back off his face to reveal Jermayne.
Whenever Ramona gets me back to thinking about what I would do and wouldn’t do under certain circumstances—hunger or love—I tell her I have known hunger. I have watched people eat at the station kiosks the way tourists line up to watch sunsets, and yet I have never found it in myself to beg.
Instead I stole fruit. I ate leftovers off the kiosk tables. I swooped on crusts ahead of sparrows.
One morning I was sitting on a bench on the park side of the station. An old white labrador I’d seen hanging about, ownerless, came and sat on the ground by my feet. The dog paid me no attention. It just wanted that patch of ground in front of me. People walked by. I sat unnoticed, whereas the dog drew glances and smiles. Those who missed it the first time slowed down to look back over their shoulders. Some stopped to pat it. One woman fed it a sweet. She had to unwrap it and the dog gulped at it, then the sweet seemed to become lost in its mouth. It chomped and chomped, and in the end spat it out so I bent down and picked the sweet up and ate it myself. The dog lay down with its head on its paws and its eyes floated up in the direction of someone approaching. I tried the same—only with women though. I didn’t want any of the other business.
Within two days I had attracted the help of the Englishwoman the inspector spoke to. Her testimony is filled with stuff about gypsies. It says nothing of the money I stole from her. The stealing didn’t start at her place. It started when I risked Jermayne’s face suddenly appearing in the moonlight on the night I snuck back to Bernard’s neighbourhood. I was hoping to see the little Frenchman and hug him. I slipped through the hole in the wall. I kept to the shadows and avoiding the light from the fires crept into the warehouse. Bernard wasn’t there, but my plastic bag with my hotel uniform, toothbrush and sticking knife was still under his bed. I felt under the mattress where I had seen Bernard stick his own plastic bag with money. I took half the money—I hoped he had paid off the loan and got his tooth back—and I slipped out of there. I didn’t breathe until I left the hole in the wall. I walked up the same block where Jermayne had driven me with his stick. Under a streetlamp I counted twenty euros. Another thirty and I could see my boy.
When someone picks up a stray there is no telling where it has come from. From the point of view of the dog and its saviour this is good. There is no history to speak of. Without any history there is nothing to worry about, no dark shadows to fear. Dog and saviour start out as new.
So I did not tell the Englishwoman anything of my past— Jermayne, the boy, Bernard, the Four Seasons Hotel and the whole story of how I had come to Berlin—all of that had to stay unsaid. I did not want to be somebody’s problem to solve any more. I preferred to be a stray dog.
The Englishwoman made me up a bed on her couch. She fed me. I took hot showers. I used her soap and her shampoo and her toothpaste. I stole two pairs of her underwear. I stole the ten-euro note I saw sitting under a glass on the kitchen table. The next morning there was another ten euros—in the same place—and I took that too. On the third morning there was a twenty-euro note. I took that and made my way to Jermayne’s building.
When he heard my voice the very air itself seemed to be sucked out of the intercom. So I got in quickly. I told him I had fifty euros.
We sat under the trees above the canal. ‘Look. Ente. Ente,’ I said. The boy’s eyes stared at his feet. We went to the playground. I put him up on the slide and in the swing. His weight felt dead between my hands. He went down the slide without his hands in the air. He sat on the swing with his little body collapsed in on itself. I wished I had some chocolate. I wished I still had Bernard’s list of things to say. We needed to start over, and to do that we would need the football.
I was planning to visit Bernard the next night. That same morning, the Englishwoman said she had some people she wanted me to meet. She didn’t mention the African Refugee Centre.
The pastor was a black man. He sat me down in his office. He asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. Did I need something to drink? ‘No,’ I said. I kept looking around to see where the Englishwoman had got to.
The pastor asked me what I knew best in the world. I told him I knew how to be a hotel maid.
He sat back in his chair and folded his hands beneath his chin. His eyes were warm, though, and I didn’t mind them peering at me.
‘I’d be interested to learn,’ he said, ‘what a hotel maid knows.’
So I listed the things—how to clean, how to fold sheets properly so that they don’t get a crease, knowing when to look the other way rather than cause a guest embarrassment. I told him a guest lives their life more openly than the rest of us. We make the same filth, but no one else gets to see it.
The pastor listened and thought about what I had said, then he asked me if I had God in my life. I said I like to think He is there but He hasn’t been paying me much attention lately. The pastor laughed and shifted in his chair and became round-faced and kindly again.
He wanted to know what had brought me to Berlin. I didn’t mention the boy. When I told him I had drifted here on the tide his smile slipped from his eyes and teeth. The pastor had a willing laugh but he didn’t want to be taken for a fool. Then as he thought more he began to nod his head.
He asked me if I had any experience working with blind people.
‘Just myself,’ I said.
Again the pastor laughed. He picked up the phone and began dialling. The person at the other end answered and as the pastor talked his eyes didn’t leave mine. He was like an old concierge showing off that he could talk to the white people. After a few minutes he put the phone down.
He looked at his watch, then back at me. Very politely he asked me if I had time to meet a blind gentleman. He sat with his arms fanned out from his sides, half out of his chair as he waited on my say-so.
I thought we would go off in a car or walk up the road to catch a train. But we didn’t leave the building. We went out to the foyer, where we got in an old lift and rose to the top floor. As we came out of the lift the old gentleman was standing by the door to his apartment.
The pastor introduced us and the old gentleman shook my hand. He was tall and sagged down through his shoulders. It was as if he had been looking forward to meeting me for some time and here at last we were. I have known hotel guests like him. They are so polite it is as if they need to prove that the pecking order that exists in the world does not apply to the moment at hand.
Some chairs at the far end of a long room were waiting for us. The pastor and I stood back to watch the blind gentleman make his way. The floorboards were like a tightrope. At any moment he might make a mistake. But he found his chair and when he dropped into it I noticed small beads of sweat over the pastor’s forehead. They hadn’t been there back in his office.
The pastor talked me up. He talked up my success and hotel experience. He told the blind gentleman I had risen to ‘the trusted position of supervisor’.
The blind gentleman directed the conversation back to me. He wanted to know what I was interested in. Did I like to read? Did I have hobbies, interests? How many languages did I possess? After that he and the pastor talked between themselves. They talked about Tunisia. Years ago, the old gentleman said, he’d looked into a holiday there. He had a skin condition that only the sun made better. Psoriasis. Instead of going to Tunis he went to a spa in Turkey where he sat in a hot pool with other skin sufferers and tiny fish nibbled the dead skin.
The pastor talked about the therapeutic properties of salt water. He said a soul ready for baptism ought ideally to wade into the sea. A pond wasn’t the same. And a bowl of water was just a gimmick. The talk returned to Tunisia. And on to Yemen. Yemen interested the blind gentleman and for a while they discussed mud buildings, Yemenite Jews, the Islamists. For a longer while still they talked about Iraq. The bl
ind gentleman held out his palms to the pastor and asked, ‘But why would they lie?’ The Americans, I think he meant. They went on talking until the pastor glanced down at his watch. The time gave him a surprise. He stood up. I went to follow but he put out a hand. I should stay put. Now he spoke in Deutsch. Then, in English I heard the pastor say, ‘So it is agreed. Excellent.’ That rounded smile entered his face, eyes and teeth.
‘Our friend wishes to know when you can start.’
‘Now,’ I said. The blind gentleman’s cheeks rose as he smiled. The line of pleasure stopped just beneath his sightless eyes.
Before the pastor left the old gentleman showed me my room. My own room. I sat on the bed. I walked to the window. The two men stood in the door watching me, well, the pastor did at least. It’s hard to see what the old gentleman did with his eyes. That part of him just seemed to droop from his face, but it drooped with kindness and the lived-in quality of old fruit.
I walked the pastor out to the lift. I thanked him briefly, but not nearly enough, no more so than you do someone who has picked up something you’ve dropped.
I saw the pastor only a few times after that. Each time I thought I must go and thank him again, thank him from my heart. I saw his face through the ground-floor windows. Another time I saw him getting into a car.
A week went by and I decided to go downstairs to thank the pastor properly. In the same office where I had sat watching the pastor on the phone a black woman looked up at me with unfriendly eyes. I asked her what had happened to the pastor. She said he had just been filling in for her. Now he was back with his parish on the other side of the city. After that I never went back to the refugee centre.
thirty-one
To lie down flat and sleep will sound like an ordinary privilege. I only mention it out of respect for the decision I made never ever to take it for granted. To lie down between clean sheets and with a pillow for my head. Apart from the cubicle in the station toilets I could at last be alone without anyone to see me and wonder what I was doing in their neighbourhood or how I had come to be. When I was alone in that room it was as though the world had forgotten me. The world could not cause me any more trouble. All I had to do was to stay in that room.
That is how I tell Ramona to think about prison. I tell her not to think about the world not letting her out to join it. I tell her it is better to think of the world being kept away in case it tempts her back into trouble. Knowing Ramona, she will meet a man and within a week will want to stab him through his armpit. The only way to get through where we are from one day to the next is to think of where we are as a better place.
For a time the world didn’t spring any nasty surprises. I put on my hotel uniform and went to work. I made the old gentleman his meals, I made him his tea and coffee, it was up to me to go out into the world to buy the food and take him out for walks. He gave me money which he said was to pay for my housekeeping duties. On top of that money he gave me more for food. At the money machine I had to steer his blind fingers onto the right keys for him to draw money out of his account. He relied on me to count out the money. I never took more than what he wanted withdrawn. I discovered I could take from the money meant for food, but I couldn’t go into his account and fill a sack with money. Three hundred euros a week went on food and the alcohol he said he needed. I made sure he was never out of alcohol, but I could be stingy with food.
Jermayne was suspicious. Just a few weeks earlier I had no money and I was begging him to see the boy. Now I had money and I was as calm as a face in a passing tram window. What had happened? I told him I had a position at a hotel. Jermayne seemed happy with that explanation. It made sense. What else would I do? The world was back to working order. ‘What about your ridiculous friend?’ he asked. I told him I hadn’t seen him. I’d taken Jermayne at his word and not gone back to Bernard’s hole-in-the-wall neighbourhood.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look.’
I continued to visit my little Frenchman, but never during the day, always at night, and at an hour when the lights were out at Jermayne’s. I know because I always checked before continuing on over the bridge into Bernard’s neighbourhood. No matter how comfortable my life was, it didn’t give me what Bernard did, which was a devotion. I felt it in his hands and in his breath when I lay down next to him in the dark. When it was time to go he wouldn’t come further than the hole in the wall just in case Jermayne was waiting to pounce on him outside. He wasn’t afraid of Jermayne, but he took his threats seriously, as I did. Bernard did not want to see me lose the chance to see my boy. He liked to say I had turned myself into a shooting star. He would look up in the dark and there I was. The next night he’d look up and in the same dark space between his head and the rafters he couldn’t find a trace of me.
The other reason for sneaking back to Bernard’s neighbourhood was so I could get the football.
And now, in the warm afternoons of early summer, we kicked the ball back and forth as we’d done when we were still two unknown islands seeking connection.
There was another change. Abebi was working different hours. So these days we met by the bronze lions at the bottom of the Tiergarten. Jermayne was feeling more secure because now he left us alone. I could do whatever I pleased with the boy, but always it had to involve the ball. Even when we went for a walk we had to do so kicking the ball back and forth to each other, until I came to think of it as a ball and chain like I’d seen in a film starring George Clooney on television at the Four Seasons. They break the chain, I forget how, and end up singing songs at a radio station.
One afternoon in Tiergarten some barefoot white minstrels wandered across the grass blowing flutes. The boy trapped the ball. He looked up, then he picked up the ball and placed his hand in mine. I don’t know what it was about those barefoot minstrels that made him afraid, but I am glad they came along when they did. For the rest of the hour, hand in hand, we walked the paths and beneath the trees and across the grass. I bought the boy an ice cream. I saw other mothers with children floating plastic boats on the ponds and thought, that’s how we must look too, like the most natural thing in the world.
Whenever I need to persuade myself that there was once a time when I belonged in the world this is the afternoon I return to. The boats on the ponds. The boy’s hand in mind. His other hand gripped the cone, his happy eyes looking up over that white hill of ice cream.
My life as a normal person continued throughout the summer. I could notice a green police van without turning away and looking for a place to hide. On my time off I looked in the shop windows and saw clothes I would like to buy for the boy. Shoes and shirts. But, I thought, I would hate the day to come when I had no money to buy time to see the boy and at the same time know that I had wasted fifty euros on clothes he didn’t need. As far as I could tell he did not go without. In any case it was a stupid fantasy. Jermayne would need to support it and tell Abebi that he had bought the clothes and then the boy would have to be sworn to silence.
Bernard was curious to know about the old gentleman, what he looked like. He wanted to hear about the conversations, what the gentleman said and what I said. Well, I did not have much to say. Since the old gentleman had opinions on everything. He knew about everything. When we walked out in the world with his arm through mine we walked no faster than what allowed him to talk. He did ask me questions about myself. Where I was born. How I came to live in Italy. Once he asked me if I had ever been on an airplane. I replied honestly, ‘No.’ Just then I pointed to a squirrel that ran across our path. For a few minutes he talked about squirrels and how the squirrel population had suffered during the war. Then I pointed up at the white vapour trail of a plane. He raised his face, out of habit I suppose, and looked lost. He talked about a cruise ship he’d been on, and the strangeness of swimming in pools of water far out to sea. He asked if I had ever been on a ship. ‘No,’ I said. I had replied honestly and without seeing how talk and words could lay down snares. Snare is a word B
ernard taught me. The next ten minutes were uncomfortable. The old gentleman stopped talking. The conversation we just had still rung in our ears as we walked on. His arm looped through mine and yet I had the feeling the more nothing was said the more we seemed to be walking apart from one another.
I had been caught out. Now the story told by the pastor had a crack in it. So did his trust in me. On our walks he did not speak so freely as he had. When we visited the zoo he asked to be led to the birdcages, and there he would ask me to describe a bird. It was a game he’d invented. He had to guess the name of the bird from my description. But my description was the problem. My English was not as good as the gentleman’s. When I said a bird had a red chest he would ask me to refine red. Red came in many varieties, he said. As many varieties as there are birds. And so I would have to rack my brain to come up with something else that captured perfectly the red of the feathers. I was no good at this game and soon we stopped playing it. Then we stopped going to the zoo. We walked in the park and we sat down on the bench without anything to say. We needed a football. We needed something.
That something turned out to be the feel of my skin under the gentleman’s blind eye.
We are back to Ramona’s preoccupation—of finding out how far I would go in order to carry on seeing my boy.
One night after I had cleared the dishes away I sat with the gentleman. I asked him what it was like to be around someone he couldn’t see. ‘Like being round ghosts,’ he said. ‘You hear the voice, but don’t see the body. Take yourself,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what you look like.’