by Deborah Levy
‘You have a husband?’
‘I do, yes.’
Apparently, City airport had been closed that morning because an unexploded bomb from the Second World War had been found in the Thames. He could no longer drive so he had taken a train and a tube to find me. Warren Street tube station was nearby. It was on the Victoria Line, represented on the tube map as the light blue line. That kind of blue was too cheerful for me, but no one knew that, except Wolfgang. I reached out my hand to catch the blossom falling from America.
4
Rainer was always the guardian angel when my father and brother came to visit me. He courteously saw them off, insisted they stay away. As far as he was concerned their presence was interfering with my recovery. Rainer was born in Dresden, once called the Florence of the Elbe. Yes, Rainer was born near the Czech border. I wondered if he had heard of the cakes that Walter liked in Prague called little coffins?
‘No, I don’t think I ever saw a little coffin.’
‘You know, Rainer, I wish you had been around when I was young and growing up.’ He encouraged me to sleep. A few minutes after he left, I heard a mirror shatter. It was an echo of something that had happened on the Abbey Road crossing. I had glanced at myself in the wing mirror of the car, Wolfgang’s car, and it had exploded into a heap of reflective shards. Some of them were inside my head.
The nights were all about phantoms in America. In the day, lying on my back in the hospital on the Euston Road, I was usually somewhere in the GDR.
I could smell the glue in Ursula’s apartment in East Berlin. It was made from the bones of animals. Walter had used it to mend the wooden train with red wheels.
‘The lights are very bright here,’ I said to Rainer. ‘They are not like moonlight, which is the earth’s nightlight.’
‘Correct,’ Rainer said encouragingly.
‘They are like interrogation lights.’
‘Have you ever been interrogated, Saul?’
‘No. But Walter has and it’s my fault.’ I was sweating. I sweated all night and all day and was convinced it had more to do with fear than sepsis.
‘It’s good to hear you talking again.’ Rainer adjusted the drip that was inserted into the back of my hand. ‘Even though you speak of sad events from another time. Is it true that your friend would have been interrogated?’
‘I think it is likely to be true.’
Rainer nodded as if he agreed it was likely to be true, which made me feel worse.
‘I want you to get stronger and to lead a normal life.’
‘What is a normal life, Rainer?’
‘In medical terms I can answer that, sort of. But I don’t think that is what you mean to ask me.’
I wondered if he had been speaking to Wolfgang.
‘You know you are very fortunate? You ruptured your spleen. Internal bleeding. Not too bad, considering.’
‘What is a spleen?’
‘An organ in the upper far left of the abdomen, to the left of the stomach. It’s shaped like a fist, about four inches long. The surgeon has removed part of your spleen, not the whole thing. She wanted to avoid the risk of infection but it’s got infected anyway.’
The Stasi officials disguised as doctors were also taking scans of my brain. The images were sent to the radiologist, who wrote reports for Rainer to read. There were people looking at detailed images of the inside of my head. When I asked Rainer, again, how it was that he became an informer, he dragged a chair to the right side of my bed and moved his face closer to my right ear, which is where I could best hear him. It meant he had to talk to me in a strange position, his lips near my ear. I appreciated him making the effort. He wanted me to understand that it was important to get some facts straight. He was a doctor, not a Stasi spy. We were in Britain in 2016.
‘But when did I cross Abbey Road?’
‘You have crossed Abbey Road many times,’ Jennifer interrupted.
Sometimes I forgot she was there.
‘Why did I cross Abbey Road so many times?’
‘To have sex with me of course.’
‘But when did I get run over?’
‘Ten days ago.’
‘I’ve mixed then and now all up.’ My words came out slurred, as if I were drunk.
‘That’s what I do in my photographs.’ Jennifer put on her coat and tapped my nose with what she thought was affection, but it hurt.
Rainer seemed to be reliable and kind. It was hard to believe that he could be trusted. It was all the more confusing because he was from Germany, which is where he trained at medical school. I wasn’t going to let him off lightly.
‘Did you inform on the priest and the people in your church group, Rainer?’
‘Nope.’
‘You were not alone. There were eighty-five thousand full-time employees of the Stasi and sixty thousand unofficial collaborators, one hundred and ten thousand regular informers and half a million part-time informers.’
Rainer clapped his hands as if he were applauding an opera.
‘Saul,’ he said, ‘your brain is switched on again.’
I was shocked to hear it was ever switched off. I explained that I was a historian. I wondered if my students were waiting for me to unlock the lecture theatre and indeed give a lecture.
‘I think your brother is sorting out your sick leave at the university.’
‘So long as he’s not teaching my students.’ I must have smiled because the corners of my mouth had turned upward.
Rainer told me he knew of an informer in the GDR who had reported a colleague who had had too many beers and criticized the educational policies. These were stories that people knew about. But my question about what a normal life might be interested him. He thought we should leave out the medical aspect and try to figure out the rest of it.
‘Tell me, Saul, what do you think a normal life would be like?’
He started to answer his own question. Housing. Food. Work. Health.
‘Those things were not enough for Luna.’
I was crying and sweating. What was the rest of it? To live without fear. No, that was impossible. To live with less fear, I whispered to Luna. To live with more hope. To not be hopeless all the time. I didn’t know where all the tears were coming from. Life is shocking. But the shock seemed to go back a long time to my mother’s car crash. To America. To East Berlin. And then forwards and backwards and all over the place to missing Walter Müller. Maybe a normal life was sitting in a pub with Walter and having a beer. I still couldn’t think about being fifty-six. I had not seen my face in a mirror since the accident. The mirror was inside me. Jennifer had returned to my side. She was eating cheese. Salty goat’s cheese. I think she had given some of it to Rainer. He was holding a paper napkin in his hand. Did doctors eat lunch on the ward? I was still suspicious of Rainer.
After a while I told them both that I would like to see my mother again.
‘Then perhaps you should visit her.’ Jennifer was now wiping her fingers on the napkin she had passed to Rainer.
‘She’s dead.’
I lifted my fingers to my head.
‘Jennifer, where is my hair?’
‘Don’t think about it. Visit your mother.’
It was our old game. We had played it many times when we still loved each other. Jennifer was wearing a black silk shirt. A pencil poked out of its pocket. I could smell the leather of her bag when she took a notebook out of it. Leather and silk. This was older Jennifer. The goat’s cheese was more like younger Jennifer, when she was a vegetarian and made sweet potato curry with Saanvi and discussed infinity in the sauna for hours while Claudia practised her t’ai chi positions.
The pencil was now gripped in her fingers.
‘I can see cobblestones and a castle,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t sound like Bethnal Green.’
‘Heidelberg. A Gothic university on a hill surrounded by forest.’
Her hand did not move across the page that lay open on her lap.
Her hand was soft and still. I wanted to kiss it but I feared she might walk away.
‘I thought you were going to draw?’
‘I don’t like drawing buildings,’ she said. ‘So far, we have never met your mother.’
I touched my head again. And then again.
‘Jennifer, am I ugly now?’ She did not answer and I still couldn’t look at her, but I knew she was the real Jennifer because of the ylang-ylang that always came with her. Rainer was sitting on the visitor’s chair next to new older Jennifer, whose older fingers gripped the pencil, waiting for me to say something that interested her. I glanced at her feet. She was wearing silver shoes with three silver straps buckled across the instep. The toe of her right shoe rested on the toe of Rainer’s black polished shoe.
I heard myself speaking for Jennifer’s pencil, anything to get the toe of her sandal away from Rainer’s shoe.
I am walking on the cobblestones of the main drag in Heidelberg. A man has laid out a blanket on the stones. He sits on the blanket, playing his guitar. Three dogs sleep at his feet. His guitar seems to attract other dogs from the town: I can see them making their way to the blanket. He’s only playing three chords, but they like it. They shut their eyes, calmed by his very basic music.
‘I like basic music too.’ Jennifer sounded quite cheerful so I must have stopped boring her. Why was she always by my side?
Please, I say to the man playing his guitar, can you tell me where I can find my mother? He shakes his head and requests in a whisper that I do not bring my own sadness to Germany and wake up the dogs.
‘Jennifer, where is my hair?’
I could see her hand moving across the page. It was such hard work being involved with someone like Jennifer Moreau. I was even obliged to entertain her from my sickbed.
‘At least we’ve got past the butcher’s shop in Bethnal Green,’ she said.
I glanced at her sketchbook. Jennifer had drawn the man with the dogs sleeping by his feet. She had written in pencil, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ Except one of the dogs had its eyes open.
My eyes were open too. Jennifer’s silver shoe had now fallen off her right foot. Someone must have undone the three buckles of the straps.
Rainer had disappeared. He lived in an office somewhere in the wall.
‘But you didn’t meet your mother.’ Jennifer ripped the page out of her sketchbook.
‘Oh God, Jennifer, is it true that you were pregnant when I returned from East Berlin?’
She slid the pencil back into the pocket of her black silk shirt. ‘Shall we talk about what happened when you got back from the GDR?’
‘Yes, I want to. Anything to get away from the sleeping dogs in Heidelberg.’
5
In late January 1989, Jennifer and I were sitting in a cheap Italian restaurant called Pollo in Old Compton Street, Soho. It was always full of students from St Martins art school around the corner because it offered its loyal impoverished customers three courses for a fiver. Jennifer had introduced me to Pollo when we first met. Once we discovered spaghetti vongole and penne arrabbiata it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our gloves. Jennifer was pregnant and she said the child was mine. This was the first time we had seen each other since I had returned from East Berlin. She said she wanted to keep the child, despite graduating from art school with a first-class degree. She was leaving Britain to take up her residency in America. I had not realized how large her belly would be at four months pregnant. Perhaps it was relative because she was usually as slim as a pencil. Despite the cold, she wore a pale yellow halter-neck dress under a thick cardigan because nothing else fitted her. She devoured a plate of spaghetti bolognese even though she was supposed to be a vegetarian. While she drank water, I knocked back a carafe of red wine and then ordered another one.
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: we have separated so I will bring up my child without you.’
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: I am happy to abolish all traditions. I am with the poets and heretics and dissidents. It’s your body and you do what you wish with it.’
That was a shock tactic because what I wanted was for Jennifer to marry me and for us to live together and to raise our child together, but I thought she would reject me (again) if I spoke my wish out loud. Instead I asked if she would like to borrow my jacket.
‘I’m not cold.’
It was true that it was warm inside Pollo. Everyone was smoking and shouting as the waiters thumped plates of steaming pasta on the Formica tables. A young man with a blue Mohican was stubbing his cigarette out in the avocado that had arrived on a plate. It was stuffed with something pink.
‘That’s Otto,’ Jennifer whispered. ‘He’s a genius and he taught me a lot.’ Otto looked about fifteen but Jennifer said he was twenty-three. She waved to him. He waved back and pointed contemptuously at his prawn cocktail.
‘Chef wanted!’ he shouted across the tables.
She told me that Otto was going to help her carry her suitcase to the airport in ten days’ time.
‘Don’t go, please don’t go, but if you do I will help you with your bags. You haven’t given me your address or your telephone number.’
It was as if she hadn’t heard me.
After a while, she asked me to tell her about my stay in the GDR.
She was not that surprised when I told her about my affair with Walter Müller. She listened for a long time. While I was speaking, a woman waiting with a crowd of students for a table to become free spilled the glass of wine that Otto had passed to her on to Jennifer’s yellow halter-neck dress. This accident prompted me to tell her about spilling coffee on Walter’s only pair of Wrangler’s.
‘He sounds like an interesting person. How did he fit into your jeans?’
‘With difficulty.’
‘What do you think of him having a wife and child?’
‘He has to live a double life.’
‘Do you live a double life?’
‘No.’ I dabbed at the wine stain on her yellow dress with a napkin. ‘I have always been open with you about my sexuality.’
I did not tell her about Luna.
It was a crisp, cold winter evening in Soho. We were angry and confused but we could not stop touching each other. We walked down Frith Street and when I put my arm around her shoulders I noticed that after a while her arm slipped around my waist. She was twenty-four and pregnant. Her lips were soft as she shivered, despite the chunky cardigan that Saanvi had knitted her. This time I did not ask her permission, I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
‘You know, Saul, you might be a good father.’ Suddenly we were kissing outside Ronnie Scott’s. Deep kissing. In that kiss I tried to beam all my love into her. My eyes were open and hers were closed, her eyelashes mascaraed blue. I noticed she had pierced her nose in the months since we had separated. I couldn’t believe I had not seen the small gold hoop glittering in her right nostril when we sitting together at Pollo.
‘You are blooming,’ I said to her. ‘Your hair and eyes are shining and your breasts have become heavier.’
‘I told you never to describe my body to me or to anyone else.’
I had hoped that the pregnancy would free me from our agreement, but apparently it had not.
We kissed again and when I looked down there was a beggar, a man sitting on the pavement with his dog. He was about thirty. A year older than myself. He caught my eye and gave me the thumbs up. When I placed my hand on Jennifer’s stomach, she pushed it away. We continued kissing.
‘I will be a good father,’ I whispered in her cold ear.
‘Yes. But you would be a terrible husband.’
‘We don’t have to get married.’
‘You’re already a terrible boyfriend.’
When I told her I loved her and wanted to be with her when the baby was born, she s
uddenly raised her hand.
I thought she was going to push me into the gutter with the beggar, but she was hailing a taxi.
‘Yes,’ older Jennifer said, ‘I knew I had to get away from your love as fast as possible.’
Her shoes were lying somewhere on the floor.
‘I don’t think either of us had a clue.’
‘Very likely,’ she agreed, but she was on her phone. Her voice was unrecognizable to me, perhaps because she was speaking to someone she loved. ‘Sweetheart, if you’ve lost your Travelcard, it might be with your keys. Look in all your pockets.’
After she’d put her phone away, I asked her if she would like me to do up the buckles on her shoe. Jennifer scooped the silver shoes up and swung her feet on to the bed while I attempted to do something normal like fasten a buckle. It was a very tricky task to perform with a drip in my arm.
‘It’s not that I didn’t want your love,’ she said suddenly, ‘it’s more like I didn’t feel it.’
‘That’s not true,’ I whispered, ‘I know you felt it.’
‘True. It was more like I wanted all your love, but that was never going to happen.’
I remembered the portrait of myself on her bedroom wall. How she had outlined my lips in red felt-tip, three words graffitied underneath it.
DON’T KISS ME.
‘You made off with my son,’ I reminded her, trying and failing to ease the spike of the buckle into the leather hole.
‘You were in love with Walter Müller.’
A nurse was doing the rounds in the ward. The sound of a plastic curtain whooshing around the beds. Whispered questions and answers. Sometimes moans of pain or stoic laughter.
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: you took our son off to live in America.’
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: that’s where the work was. It was the start of everything. I had just graduated. How was I going to support my child?’
‘You could have asked me.’