by Deborah Levy
The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have all tried to drug us, to regiment us in the most promising years of our lives.
Perhaps I should order twelve white roses for Jennifer? After all, she was in the most promising years of her life.
No, they had to be sunflowers. They were the only sort of flower she liked to look at in a vase, mostly because of their dark centres, which apparently reminded her of an eclipse, though I’m not sure she had ever seen an eclipse.
I rang another florist and they too did not have sunflowers in stock. Third time lucky I found the sunflowers. This time the florist was a man. He told me he was from Cyprus and that his name was Mike. When he asked me for the message to write on the card, my voice came out strangely shaky and high-pitched. I did not recognize it.
‘Sweet Jennifer, good luck for the show, from the careless man who loves you.’
The florist called Mike cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, but could you speak in English?’
I couldn’t work out what he meant. I repeated the message, along with my name and credit card details. This time my voice was less feeble. There was a pause, then Mike said, ‘I don’t speak German. I think it’s German anyway, but whatever it is you’re saying, remember we won the war.’
I could hear him laughing as I kept repeating the message. While he laughed I realized I was thinking my message in English but saying it out loud in German, so I switched to English: ‘Sweet Jennifer, good luck for the show, from the careless man who loves you.’ After confirming that careless was not two words, as in care less, we were home and dry. Mike said it was a pleasure doing business with me and that his real name was not Mike. What’s more, if he had known I could speak other languages, he would have told me his full name. ‘But anyway, take care, Saul.’
That day I had had two people say, ‘Take care, Saul.’
When I turned on the shower and washed the blood off my knees, I found myself appalled that Jennifer had not noticed my body was actually grazed and bleeding when we made love. I could smell her ylang-ylang oil on my skin. I am so turned on by ylang-ylang. Afterwards I got on with ironing the shirts I would pack for East Germany. It took a while to set up the ironing board and fill my vintage iron with water. It was either too hot or too cool but it took my mind off things to point the heavy steel tip at the sleeves, work my way to the cuffs and see the steam rise. I unbuttoned the cuffs and turned them inside out so that I could iron around the buttons. It was crucial not to iron over the buttons, which always leaves a mark. It took me a while to unbutton all the buttons. Frankly, what with the car accident and my first ever offer of marriage being rejected, it felt like I had been beaten up. That was what Stalin most hated, the beatings from his father. I hung up the shirts and stepped on to my balcony. A crowd of sooty ungainly crows were hopping around on the grass of Parliament Hill Fields. One of them suddenly took off and flew towards a bird bath. It was carrying something in its beak and then it dropped it in the bird bath. Maybe it was a mouse, which reminded me that Stalin loved his daughter, Svetlana, as a cat loves a mouse. How did I love Jennifer and how did she love me? I’m not sure she loved me at all. She was definitely the cat and I was the mouse. This made me think that I should have a go at being the cat for a change, but it didn’t feel very arousing.
So far, I had kept my part of the deal – to never describe, in words, how amazingly beautiful she was, either to her or to anyone else. Not the colour of her hair or skin or eyes, not the shape of her breasts or lips or nipples, or the length of her thighs or the texture of her pubic hair, or whether her arms were toned or the size of her waist or whether she shaved under her arms or painted her toenails. Apparently, I had no new words with which to describe her, but if I wanted to say, ‘She is amazingly beautiful,’ that was okay with her because it didn’t mean anything. Given that she was always going on about my own sublime beauty, I wondered if it meant anything. To her. She was making it mean something in her photographs, but she said these weren’t really about me, it was the whole composition that was important and I was just one part of it. Why had she outlined my lips in red felt-tip in that photograph above her bed? I knew how much she loved to kiss me, so why did she write, DON’T KISS ME? It was as if she thought that having sex made her vulnerable and gave me too much power. Jennifer did not want to give me that sort of power, so I just had to busk it with her. She was quite interested in a male student at her art school called Otto. He had blue hair and was her age. Even if she believed that he was destined to become the new most famous artist in the world, I knew that black was the colour of her true love’s hair.
4
I unlocked the postbox in the lobby of my apartment block to see if the Abbey Road photographs had arrived. These would be my gift to Luna Müller, the younger sister of my translator, Walter Müller. When I’d put the key into the lock, it had felt slightly loose, as if the screws had been gouged out and then hastily screwed back again. Yet when I’d looked at the postboxes for the other tenants, I could see they were also in a state of disrepair. The wood on all of them was chipped. Most of the brass locks, which were made in the 1930s, were missing screws. It had been more difficult than usual to align the key with the hole. The landlord raised our rents every year but did nothing to repair the building, which was more or less falling down. The old lady from upstairs, Mrs Stechler, stepped out of the lift and hobbled into the lobby, her gloved hands gripping the steel tube of her Zimmer. She seemed startled to find me on my knees, staring at the locks on all the postboxes. She wore a fur coat and started complaining about her arthritis, how the wet weather inflamed it and made her even more lame. ‘Rain is bad news for my bones,’ she said in her gloomy, deep voice. I glanced through the glass doors of the lobby. The sun was shining. The grass in the communal gardens was still yellow from the heatwave that summer. The autumn leaves were not wet.
‘Something wrong, Saul?’
‘No.’
‘I wanted to ask about your surname,’ she said.
‘What about it?’
‘On your postbox you have the name Saul Adler.’
‘Yes.’
‘Adler is a Jewish name.’
‘So?’
She waited for me to say more and I did say more.
‘Saul is a Jewish name, too. All right with you?’
Her mouth hung open as if she were searching for a bigger hole to breathe through. It would seem that my name was the spectre haunting Mrs Stechler.
I stood up because it was too abject talking to her on my knees. After a while, I asked if she could tell me where to buy a tin of pineapple.
‘Everywhere. Every shop has a tin of pineapple. Even the corner shop. Do you want slices or chunks? Syrup or juice?’
She stared at me through her thick spectacles, as if I were a thief intent on robbing all the postboxes in the building. I had found an envelope in my postbox and was curious to open it but didn’t want her to watch me. She told me she was going to buy a slice of poppy-seed cake at the new Polish shop, and while she was at it she needed to find something to remove the stain on her turtle-green sofa. I was thinking about turtles and what kind of green represented them in the upholstery business when she started to complain again about the pain in her joints and the weather. I could not recall a Polish shop in the street she had named. There was a butcher’s shop and a newsagent, and a hair salon that mostly catered to pensioners like herself, but nothing that resembled a Polish shop, unless the Bengali newsagent had started to sell Eastern European pastries. I was distracted because I had now opened the envelope and was staring at the photos, three of them, in black and white.
There I was, walking barefoot on the zebra crossing in my white suit with the flared trousers, my hands in the pockets of the white jacket. There was a note from Jennifer:
By the way, it’s not John Lennon who walked barefoot. That was Paul. JL wore white shoes. Managed to get you in mid-stride like the original, thanks to my trusty stepladder.
I did not rem
ember taking off my shoes, but it was true, I was barefoot in the photograph. When I looked up, I saw that Mrs Stechler had left her Zimmer in the lobby, tucked behind the porter’s desk. Through the glass doors I could see her in her fur coat, walking at a brisk pace in the direction of the bus stop. Wasn’t she supposed to be crippled with arthritis?
I put the photographs back in my postbox, locked it and walked to my nearest supermarket to buy the tin of pineapple for Walter Müller. What would Jennifer be doing today? Probably sorting out her air ticket to America. Obviously, she’d be in the dark room at college, preparing for her graduation show, and later, much later, she would be lazing in the sauna with Saanvi and Claudia, talking about infinity and how a manically depressed mathematician called Georg Cantor found a way of notating infinite numbers. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out whether to buy tinned pineapple in rings or chunks, in syrup or juice. In the end I bought two bananas, a baguette, a slice of steak, and then found myself lingering at the cheese counter. I began to feel some sympathy with the florist who only sold roses. If there was an infinity of roses to choose from, it was the same with cheese. Shropshire Blue, Stilton, Farmhouse Cheddar, Lancashire, Red Leicester, Gouda, Emmental.
I asked the male assistant to scoop me up a large wedge of oozing Brie. It dripped from his knife. He had gentle hands.
The sky was grey and so was the pavement. It had started to rain. A man in an African robe was struggling with a broken umbrella while the rain splashed over his sandals. I stopped for a glass of tea and a baklava pastry at a Turkish café. The pastry was sticky with honey. I asked for a napkin but the woman serving me did not seem to hear my request. She walked towards a young girl, about seven years old, reading a book at a table nearby, and whispered something in her ear. I thought she was asking the child to fetch me a napkin but she was adjusting one of the red ribbons in her daughter’s plaited hair.
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: the main subject is not always you.’
It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: you have made me the main subject.
5
Something was going on in my apartment block. People were running out of the building in a panic. The engineer who lived on the third floor was shouting about a fire. I couldn’t smell anything burning. There was a rumour that the firefighters were on strike, although it had not been officially announced. The landlord had advised us all to keep a bucket of sand at the ready just in case, and also to unplug all unnecessary electrical devices except for the fridge. Mrs Stechler came back with what she said was the poppy-seed cake, but I could see through the plastic bag she was holding in her gloved hands, and it looked like chunks of bloody chopped meat. When she collected her Zimmer from the lobby, she told me she thought she might have left her toaster plugged in, and come to think of it, she wasn’t sure if she had switched off her electric heater. Why would she have her electric heater on in September? I volunteered to run up to her apartment and check. There was a debate amongst the other tenants gathered outside the building about whether this was wise. It was decided that if there was a fire, I should not take the risk, but when I insisted, they advised me to at least avoid the lift.
‘He wants to die, so let him.’ Mrs Stechler actually smiled as she handed over her door keys. It was the first time I had ever seen her cheerful.
I did not run up the five flights of stairs; I walked slowly because I was still limping from the fall on the Abbey Road crossing. There was no sign of smoke when I opened her door with the keys. Everything was turned off in her flat. A heavy black telephone was positioned in the middle of the carpet. That was a strange place to keep a phone, particularly if she had arthritis and couldn’t easily lower herself to the floor. I tracked the cord and saw it was plugged into the wall socket behind the television. I made my hand into a fist and started tapping it against the wall. If I was looking for something, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to find. Was the wall hollow or was it solid? Is that what I wanted to know? I tapped again. It was as if this action made me feel important, which made me wonder if I felt unimportant the rest of the time. Did the Stasi feel more important when they were tapping walls with their fists? The telephone rang and I picked up the receiver.
‘Hello. Mrs Stechler’s phone.’
‘Who is this?’
‘My name is Saul. I’m a neighbour.’
‘It’s Isaac.’
A pain shot through my chest.
‘Mrs Stechler is not in. Can I take a message?’
‘Saul who?’
The words Saul who? filled me with terror and dread and regret.
All the same, I made an effort to speak clearly and softly into the phone.
‘Saul Adler.’
I could barely speak at all.
I realized that I was heartbroken. The Wal-Mart carrier bag that had flown in with the wind on Abbey Road was connected to America in another time, and the name Isaac was connected to America, too.
The line went dead.
Someone was breathing close to me.
I turned around and looked straight into the startled eyes of an animal. A black poodle had jumped on to the arm of the sofa. Its eyes were wet and it was whimpering. Leaseholders and tenants are not supposed to keep animals in the flats. I’d had no idea Mrs Stechler had a dog. Her purchase of raw meat instead of poppy-seed cake now made sense.
I sat on the sofa and held the poodle in my arms. The telephone started to ring again. As I stroked the dog’s warm head, I became calmer. Our breathing had somehow synchronized; we were breathing together as we waited for the phone to stop ringing. It was very tranquil to hold the dog in my arms and to breathe in time with it.
I was hungry. Ravenous. Maybe I had forgotten to eat since the near collision on Abbey Road. Sitting on the turtle-green sofa in what might be an emergency (the suspected fire) made me think of my friend Jack, who had told me he never wanted children. Jack thought that parents were aliens who spoke in weird voices to their children, and anyway, he wanted to be the centre of attention, especially the sexual attention of his lovers. No way did he want that attention stolen from him by the needs of a child or the now-endless needs of the alien parent.
I had heartily agreed with him. Jack was ten years older than me but looked younger than his thirty-eight years. He wore stylish linen jackets with black teenage sneakers, which I had always thought was a good look.
I wasn’t so sure I thought so the day we were eating moules frites in a French bistro in West London. I was aware over that lunch that we regarded ourselves as cultured, sophisticated, good-looking men, a cut above the exhausted fathers who probably had not had sex for a long time. Or not with their exhausted partners anyway.
Yet, even then, I did not totally believe myself as I agreed with Jack. Although he was droll and amusing, he was somehow lacking in feeling. I said this out loud to the dog who was now asleep on my lap.
‘He was somehow lacking in feeling.’
When Jack looked over at my plate of moules, he noticed I had left some of them uneaten. He asked if he could polish them off for me, as if he were doing me a great favour. I pushed my bowl in his direction, watching him guzzle everything, slurping the shells and chewing very fast – he thought this slurping of my leftovers made him very lovable. Which was odd. (I said this out loud again to the poodle: ‘It was odd.’) I was enjoying reminiscing about Jack with a decorative, illegal dog on my lap. If there was a fire after all, perhaps I should save its life? It was true that I could smell something acrid, bitter, but was it smoke?
I had more thoughts on handsome Jack to gather in.
I took the dog’s paw in my hand and squeezed it. After Jack had eaten my moules, he turned his attention to the bill that had now arrived on a saucer. He glanced at it and, instead of us splitting the cost equally, he insisted that as I had ordered extra bread and they had charged us for it, I should cover the cost, despite him participating in the extra bread. At the same time, he was eyeing a portion of lemon tart the man sitting
solo at the table next to us had left unfinished on his plate. Jack wanted to reach over and gobble up that, too. When he glanced conspiratorially at me, I asked myself why he was so unlovable. I think this question was on my mind when I was tapping the wall with my fist. The answer was obviously because Jack himself was unloving. I had asked the wall a question and, in its way, it had answered. I was suddenly worried that Jennifer might think that I was unloving. Jack was supposed to be playing tennis after our meal. He told me he had taken a few extra lessons from a coach to perfect his serve for this particular match. I couldn’t work out why he would gobble a large lunch before a tennis game, but he was very thin. I supposed that he himself was the child he so deplored. A child that needed feeding up.
In the meantime it was possible that while I was sitting on the sofa, stroking an illegal dog, the apartment block was in flames. I stood up and dropped the black poodle to the floor. It made an indignant sound as I picked up the paper bag with the Brie in it and slammed the front door. Again, I limped down the stairs, but I could not smell smoke. Everyone was huddled outside the block, pointing at various windows. They were all relieved to know that Mrs Stechler had not left the heater on. I told her that someone had called for her.
She took off her thick spectacles and looked confused.
‘I don’t think so. My phone has been cut off.’
She started to blow on her spectacle lenses and then scooped up the hem of her dress and wiped her eyes.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I am Jewish, too. I was born in Kraków.’
The engineer tapped my shoulder.
‘Thank you for doing the health-and-safety check, Mr Adler,’ he said sincerely. ‘It has put our minds at rest.’
I wondered why Mrs Stechler was wearing gloves and what kind of spectre lay beneath them, but I didn’t want to think about that so I ran across the road and called Jennifer from the payphone on the corner.