by Deborah Levy
‘You should have offered.’
‘Was I there at the birth?’
‘No.’
Her right shoe was now more or less buckled, three silver straps across her ankle.
‘Our son’s name is Isaac. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
I turned my back on her and pulled the white sheet over my head.
Her phone began to ring again. Something about the caller having found the keys but not the Travelcard. Jennifer was laughing but she sounded desperate. ‘ Darling, why don’t you ask your father?’ I had no idea what was going on. It was the sort of love I knew nothing about. I touched my ears as if to close all portals to the sort of love I heard in Jennifer’s voice.
6
One of the spectres that came to haunt me on the Euston Road was Luna Müller. She had no physical form, but I could feel that she was nearby. Maybe she was scared of wolves and jaguars and needed company. Luna was always slightly breathless, as if she was dancing, or perhaps running. I wondered if she had come to tell me she had made it to Liverpool. Had she discovered that Penny Lane was in the part of the city known as Mossley Hill, which is where John and Paul grew up? Or that Penny Lane was named after James Penny, a merchant and slave-ship owner who defended the slave trade to the British parliament? What did Luna from the GDR think about that then?
She did not reply and I began to worry about how she was always out of breath. All the same, it was comforting to sometimes feel her near me. Despite the way we had parted, I felt endeared to her, but I didn’t want to think about that. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. I said it out loud, ‘I feel endeared to her.’ I tried to attach myself to the man who was saying that but I wasn’t sure it was really myself. It made a change from the other spectre, namely Wolfgang, but I was too tired to open my eyes for him. I preferred the images behind my eyes, especially of Luna, her lustrous hair coiled around her head. She looked like a swan. A swan on the Spree. Her breasts and hips were heavier in the new memories that I was making of her.
One night when I was with Luna, I made the mistake of opening my mind to Wolfgang. His white shirt was ironed and starched, the collar pinned with a single blue topaz in the shape of a rose. Perhaps it was blue because I was looking at it. I was black and blue all over. My hair was black and I was blue inside.
He was there to give me some information to do with Luna. His lips were thin and dry and he licked them while he spoke.
‘They say you are no longer unconscious, but I’m not so sure. Your head hit the silver cat on the bonnet of my Jaguar.’
I wanted him to leave. Luna would have agreed with me. She wanted to escape from a reality that was so rational it was a little bit mad. My brother and father were insanely rational. They liked pointing their manly fingers in judgement. At me. As if they always knew what they meant. As if they always knew why and what and how. As if they always talked straight. As if their thoughts never bent out of shape. The man who ran me over began to tell me about his car. Apparently, it was a vintage E-Type Jaguar, first shown to the world in Geneva in 1961. The seats were made from marbled doeskin leather. He had bought the wing mirrors in Milan. The steering wheel had been carved from wood. He was most proud of sourcing the jumping Jaguar hood ornament. It had not originally been fitted to the E-Type, but alas, it was no longer in one piece.
I closed my mind and saw him off. All the same, I knew he would return because I did not want him to. Some of the shards of his wing mirrors bought in Milan were inside me. I was connected to the Jaguar. It was in my head, which was bandaged.
I had been given a plastic bowl of tinned pineapple by the woman who wheeled the lunch trolley. I saved it for Luna.
The nurse on the night shift didn’t seem to mind me talking to her about the nurse I had met in the GDR in 1988. I told her how Katrin Müller wanted to see Penny Lane for herself.
‘Was she your girlfriend?’
‘No.’
‘But you talk about her a lot.’
‘I’m worried about her. She has a treacherous friend who offered her the chance to escape.’
‘What do you think happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. She was scared of wolves and jaguars. Luna is short for lunatic.’ I started to cry. ‘She was frightened all the time. She couldn’t see an end to it.’
A fragment of a poem I did not know I knew came to mind. I spoke it out loud to the night nurse.
‘We are the Dead. Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved …’
She nodded as if I was being normal, which I wasn’t.
‘It’s by John McCrae,’ I said. ‘He was a Canadian doctor but he signed up as a gunner in the First World War.’
The night nurse told me I was making progress. I asked her if I would be home soon. She couldn’t tell me, but in her view, probably when I was able to walk and boil a kettle without help from anyone else. On one of the occasions she brought me a cup of tea ‘out of hours’ and asked about Jennifer. I noticed for the first time that her accent was Irish. She stuck a thermometer in my mouth while the plastic cup of tea cooled on the table by my bed.
‘Do you know your ex is always at your side? We’re all talking about it.’
She was silent and attentive while she took my pulse.
I pulled the thermometer from my mouth. ‘She’s not my ex.’
‘Oh. Well then, sorry, but she told me she was your girlfriend in the past.’
‘We are very much in love.’
‘Is that right?’ She put the thermometer back in my mouth. ‘Your ex wears a very strong fragrance.’
I pulled the thermometer from my mouth again. ‘Ylang-ylang.’
‘Can you stop doing that?’
She plucked the thermometer from my fingers and told me the sepsis was more or less conquered. The bowl of pineapple stood near the cup of tea. A thin green mould was creeping over the chunks.
‘Shall I chuck that away for you?’
I shook my head.
‘You have such blue eyes, like my Siamese. Goodnight, Saul.’
The way she said goodnight. As if she did not expect to see me in the morning.
7
Two of my female colleagues at the university had made the effort to visit the Euston Road. I was touched they thought I was worth the long journey from East Berlin. They still seemed to have a low opinion of me. I either spoke too loudly or too softly or too fast or not fast enough. This time my eyes were not Oceanic.
I thanked them for their help researching the youth movements that had begun in the Rhineland as an alternative to the culture of the Hitler Youth. My colleagues told me they were from the university near Hendon, North-west London. It was close to the North Circular and A41, but Central London was only a thirty-minute journey on the Thameslink rail line and Northern Line. The university was committed to a green transport policy so they had travelled on the train.
My students had signed a card and had a whip-round to buy me a bunch of roses from the Asda on the Edgware Road. The card was of Lenin unfurling the mighty red flag. Someone had drawn a pearl necklace around his neck with a black felt-tip. My colleagues told me about the new vice chancellor at another university somewhere in England. Apparently, he employed a fleet of staff to bring his Coke and sushi to his office on a tray. Three white lace doilies were to be placed on the tray, one for the glass of iced water, one for the plate of fruit, usually grapes and pears, one for the extra glass for his Coke. At teatime, around four in the afternoon, his preference, in addition to a pot of Earl Grey, was for an assortment of Scottish shortbread biscuits, Italian hazelnut biscuits, English biscuits sandwiched together with raspberry jam, an almond-filled finger of sponge tipped with chocolate (no one had heard of it before he arrived, but apparently it was called a Gazelle Horn) and one single brandy snap served with vanilla cream. It was the tea tray that compensated for the austerity of his lunch and most panicked his staff. He
owned a private helicopter, they joked, and a summer dacha near Bath Spa which he bought from a Russian oligarch. Many of the academic staff were applying for the more secure job of bringing him his Coke and sushi, but wondered if they should ask for a pay rise to prepare the tea tray. Their humour was similar to the jokes I had heard in East Germany.
After they left I threw the roses in the bin.
Someone took the roses out of the bin.
To my horror it seemed that my father was a kind man. He left small gifts by the side of my bed. A flask of soup. He had made it himself. The leeks and potatoes were so crudely chopped I couldn’t get any of the liquid out of the flask. One day he left a box of fudge called Cornish Clotted Cream. I held the box in my hands and understood he had remembered it was a childhood favourite. It made me feel faint to hold it. I drifted off and it fell from my hand.
Rainer told me it was hard for my elderly father to make the journey to the hospital, but I didn’t want to see him. Or Matt. All the same, Rainer must have relented and allowed them to visit at certain times. His teeth were very straight and white, not at all British, perhaps more German. I couldn’t tell Matt that I had attempted to visit our mother in Heidelberg, because he would mock me for making that kind of journey in the first place. Rainer advised me to give my father a chance, but I did not want to see him. I felt betrayed that he let my father hobble into the ward at various times. Although Rainer was a traitor, he too was so very kind. Like Walter.
I lay on my pillows thinking about the kindness of men.
I was being treated like a child by men who were infinitely gentle, yet I was nearly sixty. What had happened between thirty and fifty-six? Those years were lost to morphine. Matt brought in a black-and-white photograph. It was of ‘us boys’ sitting on a pair of swings in the yard of our Bethnal Green home. I was twelve, he was ten. His hair was blond, mine black. He was called Matthew because that was the name of my father’s best friend at junior school. This friend had come from a Quaker family. According to my father, Matthew’s family were his ‘extra’ family because they believed in the values of social solidarity and human dignity. They enriched his life. Matthew’s mother had taught my father how to read, and, oddly, how to make lemon curd. I think this extra accomplishment, learned from his extra family, made my father feel suave. He made lemon curd all through our childhood. We used to like watching him scrape off the lemon rind with a carrot peeler. My brother, Fat Matt, also called Matty by our mother, had a lot to live up to. Social solidarity and human dignity, just for starters. In the photograph we were both smiling, but we didn’t mean it. Our mother had just died. There was a spectre haunting our house in Bethnal Green, lurking in the kitchen amongst the rotting eggs and chicken bones.
‘You looked like a beautiful girl,’ Matt said. ‘Look at your long eyelashes.’
I drifted off, only to discover my father was there too.
‘Dad made those swings for us.’
I glanced again at the photograph of the swings that Matt was so shamelessly holding under my eyes.
The swings were swinging back and forth. Our shoes dragging on the ground. The back door to the house in Bethnal Green was open. Soon we would have to go inside. Our mother’s clothes were still in the wardrobe. A pair of her shoes lay under the kitchen table. I was wearing her pearl necklace under my T-shirt. Matt jumped off his swing. And then he pushed me on my swing until I was flying high in the air. He started to shout like a maniac, wanting me to jump off the swing while I was six feet in the air. I would not jump. I would not get off that swing. I would not walk into that house. Jump. Jump. Jump. His red face. His dead eyes. His screaming mouth. His big hands. Jump. Jump.
My father walked into the yard. His shoulders were bent. His hair unbrushed. His hands covered in dried plaster. He had been working all day with his hawk and his trowel. Matt kicked the backs of my legs every time the swing swung his way. My legs were thin and delicate and he hated them. At the same time, he pushed the swing with such force it was coming off its hinges. Jump. Jump. My father just watched him. He was not vigilant on my behalf, but he was aggressive in his passivity amongst the pots of geraniums and daffodils. My father stared into the distance while my brother kicked and pushed me at the same time. He reminded me of the guard near the lake in the GDR. The man who stood on the wooden platform in a tree, passive in his aggressive vigilance on behalf of the regime. Jump. Jump. It might be that I would have to jump to save myself from the swing that was about to crash to the ground. In the end the neighbour had to intervene. She knew we had just lost our mother and my father had lost his wife. She pulled Matt away from the swing. He fought her but she held him down, while my father watched in silence. I got off my swing and ran into the house where my mother was no longer there to see off my predators, the men who were mortified by my freakish beauty. Was I one of them or what? My brother saved his revenge for later.
I turned to Matt.
‘Where was I when I was forty?’
He thought about this for a while.
‘We never saw much of you. Sometimes you sent us a postcard from your holidays.’
‘Yes,’ my father wheezed, ‘you liked the pastries in Lisbon and the museums in Paris.’
Matt took over. ‘You sent us a postcard of Van Gogh’s starry night when you were in Arles with Claudia.’
I looked to my side to see if Jennifer was there. To my relief the only sign that she had been at my side was the torn-out page of her drawing of the sleeping dogs in Heidelberg. Except all the dogs had their eyes wide open.
My father and brother began to name the countries I had visited. Matt collected the stamps from the postcards I had sent him. He had two children to support and spent all his money doing up their home in Britain. His favourite stamp was from Bombay, but he liked the Greek stamps too. I knew they were trying desperately hard to avoid mentioning the postcard I had sent them from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
‘And then you got a bit of a paunch,’ Matt said. ‘You spent more time in your cottage in Suffolk and started to grow two kinds of tomatoes.’
I waggled my fingers at him.
‘Three.’
‘Yes,’ Matt said. ‘The usual plum, then San Marzano and the big ones, here goes, Cost-ol-uto Fior-ent-ino.’
I could hear my father guffawing. ‘Yes, those ones. You were always the bourgeois in the family and Matt the Bolshevik.’
They were still working hard to avoid arriving in Cape Cod.
My father tapped his false teeth.
‘And then there is Jack, of course.’
I lifted my arm over my eyes. Where was Jack? There were so many people around me, making sure I did not slip out of this world. Jack would understand that no one had asked for my own opinion on this endeavour.
My father lowered his voice.
‘Son, you mentioned you buried me in a matchbox.’
I nodded.
‘I think you were remembering a very small coffin.’
His old hand reached for my hand and he squeezed it.
We had finally arrived in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
After a while my brother led my father away.
8
Although I peeped now and again at Jennifer, I did not really look at her. There was something painful to find out, but I was in enough pain already. I had been moved to a private room, away from the anguished howls of elderly demented patients. My own howling kept me awake all night, anyway. Jennifer was at my side in my new private room. A new bunch of sunflowers stood tall in a vase at the foot of my bed. I was wearing my own clothes now, but I still had not looked in a mirror. Jennifer lifted off her hat. I could smell the ylang-ylang and knew she wished to smell like a flower for Rainer and not for me. She was reading a book by my side.
I made a decision to look at Jennifer. I am not sure what it was that I wanted to find out. I have done a lot of sly looking at women, of course, and my mother is frozen in my mind at the age she died, and I have been given a great dea
l of attention by women, but I have never said to myself, now you are going to look at a woman. Especially a woman I was forbidden to describe.
‘Show me your face, Jennifer.’
‘This is my face.’
When I at last looked at Jennifer I gasped and hid my head under the sheets. She did have another face. It was sadder and softer. Lines under her eyes and around her lips. Her angular face had changed to something plumper. Two silver hairs sprouted from her chin.
You are not Jennifer, I whispered into the pillow. The spectre of ylang-ylang lingered in the air. When I lifted my own hand to my eyes, I looked at it for a long time and saw that it too was not a hand I recognized. When I placed it on my stomach, which was stitched and bandaged, I encountered folds of flesh where it had once been flat. My stomach had turned into a belly. I wanted to catch up with my body. I moved my new older hand under my pyjamas and touched my penis, which seemed to be recognizable, as were my testicles. My pubic hair felt familiar, too. I moved my hand to my chest and felt hair that was soft and pleasing. I touched my nipples, the left and the right, and then I shut my eyes.
‘Jennifer?’
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me again how old you are?’
‘Fifty-one.’
‘How old am I?’
‘Fifty-six.’
I lifted the sheet from my head and stared into her eyes that were no longer the eyes of the woman I used to know. All her beauty that I was not allowed to describe, blown to bits in space and time.
She was still reading her book.
‘What happened to our youth, Jennifer?’
I heard her turning the pages.
‘That’s a good question, Saul. How old do you think you are?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘That was your age when we were together.’
‘What was I doing then?’
‘You were getting ready to go to East Berlin.’
‘Jennifer. Where did you go?’
‘What do you mean? I went to art school and then I went to America and then my work took me all over the world and then I came home.’