The movers arrived punctually and by noon were off with all our possessions except the one I guarded possessively. Judging from the frequency with which they cast their gaze at it, they must have assumed it contained its weight in Goldkrone dating back from the monarchy. The taxi wasn't long following. Seeing me struggle, the driver hastened to help me hoist the trunk into the boot. It wouldn't fit in right way up. He shifted it around with his massive arms. The idea of being left stuck in the street with Elsa like a ton of lead at my feet made me offer a surplus of help that drained his patience. Cursing in dialect, he pushed it over on its side. We both heard the thump.
'Nothing fragile?'
A wave of dread went through me. I shook my head. I saw Madeleine close the front door, dragging the last belongings out with her. I'd half hoped to be gone before she came out again, but no such luck. The boot wouldn't shut. The driver cursed again and groped around for a rope that was trapped under the trunk. Under his breath he complained that there were specialised vehicles for such purposes, that what fee he'd get wouldn't cover any damage done.
'I guess that's about it.' Madeleine balled up her boots and the last damp towels I'd left behind and held them protectively against her chest.
'Yes, I guess so,' I agreed.
She waited for me to say something. I waited for her to go. Finally, I couldn't hold back any longer and led her just far enough away from the trunk to ask, 'Tell me. Did you ever tell her?'
'Tell her what?'
'That she was free?'
'Free? To go where? On the streets like me?'
'Don't play innocent.'
'I told her more than you'd like. But not in those words. No, no woman's ever free. You men always attach us somewhere. House. Room. Through wedlock if not lock and key.' She rubbed her nose. 'Now, you tell me. Is she really where I think she is?' Her eyes were scrutinising mine.
I saw it was pointless to lie. 'Yes.'
Her eyes darted to the trunk. Anguish showed on her face. As casually as she could, she said, 'You haven't told me your new address.'
I stalled. There was an intimidating glint in her eyes. Afraid she'd do something if I didn't, I told her. Before she could ask anything else, I gave her a dry peck on the cheek, met with a stiffening of her body, and said bluntly, 'Goodbye.'
'Really? Just like that?' She tilted her face, incrassated with beige-pigmented makeup and the deeper wrinkle of hard experience, towards the sun. Then she turned back to me and her mien of emotional mendicancy reminded me of a dog waiting for a titbit at a table. When I kept her at bay with small talk, she backed away and, with a lethargic strut, made her way down the driveway and out on to the road. She didn't look back — it was as if she'd done that couldn't-care- less exit one time too many in life and her hips weren't really in it any more.
My vision was blurring and I sat down in the weeds. In doing so I got what I had done all I could to avoid: a last look at our house — its paint flaky dry skin, its windows dusty cataracts under a sagging roof, the whole a somewhat lopsided face. What few trees remained towering above the bumpy terrain of mossy stumps were stripped, arching their trunks in pain, stretching arthritic limbs towards the sky as their leaves, brownish yellow, rotted on the ground. I remembered what Pimmichen had said — it seemed only yesterday — that time reduces all to that pale old yellow: books, music, wedding veils, toenails; and now it seemed our whole house, garden, past. Rubbing my eyes, I thought I saw Elsa's face at her old dormer window waving goodbye, but it was gone as quickly. I heard a scratching inside the trunk, accompanied by a muffled meowing. I talked loudly about the weather. It didn't matter what platitude I came up with — the taxi driver ignored me. I got feebly into the cab, sitting in front next to him.
'Where to?'
'Please,' I breathed, 'Buchengasse 6, tenth district.'
Part V
xxvii
The taxi driver grated his handbrake up. I stepped out on a footpath littered with nutshells. An old man sitting on his doorstep was cracking them open. The cab was blocking his view of the children playing soccer across the street on a dusty terrain with dingy pines, as if the neighbourhood could have a depressing effect even on nature. I went to help lift the trunk out, but was probably more hindrance than help. I paid the driver his fare, including an honest tip, and he scowled at the scratches in his paintwork and left with squealing tyres, the complaint coming straight from the heart.
I pushed the trunk with my shoulder, bottom, whatever I could, until the pain in my heart forced me to pause. The new flat was on the fourth floor.
'Hee hee hee.' The old man's remaining tobacco-stained teeth reminded me of abandoned tombstones. He mimicked carrying the trunk up on his shoulder. I realised he didn't speak German and a closer look (and smell) told me he didn't live in this building — nor, in all probability, any other.
My movers came tramping down, one making my keys do acrobatics from finger to finger. I'd thought they would have gone by now, having left the keys in the mailbox as arranged. Barely had they picked up the trunk when the meowing recommenced — a thin, lamentable thread of a wail. The men gave each other the wryest of looks. The mystery was solved. I was sneaking a cat into a building in which the regulations didn't allow pets. A toddler standing on the stairs took his finger out of his nose to point at the trunk and, after a moment of mute excitement, cried, 'Cat!' His father, in his dressing-gown and slippers, was sitting on the landing below him. 'Friedrich, dear, come back to Vati. That case is heavy. You see those men? Their arms hurt them. Please . . .'
'Move it, kid,' barked one of the movers. The child waddled down to his father, his nappy like a goose's behind.
Alone with my trunk, I searched my pockets frenetically for the key. It wasn't there, it simply wasn't, no matter how I tore them inside out. The cat noises had stopped since the movers had dropped the trunk from a metre off the floor.
'Say something, Elsa! Answer me!'
She gave no sign of life. My God, maybe I'd left the key at the house? I'd never have time to go and come back! Had I packed it in one of the boxes? Oh God! Which one? I began to open them haphazardly, without thinking, without seeing. Impossible, I'd packed before the trunk was closed and locked. It must've fallen out of my pocket in the taxi. Or sitting in the grass! Did I have a hammer, a screwdriver? Yes, but in which verdammt box had I packed the tools? There were too many! What was I to do? Did I have enough money for a taxi there and back? I tore open my wallet to look and heard a coin fall. It was the key. I'd slid it in my wallet so I wouldn't lose it.
My hand was trembling as I stuck the key in the lock. I raised the lid with foreboding. At first, I couldn't feel her under the cover: it seemed empty wherever I pushed. I tore it away and my first thought was that she had no head left, for she wasn't in the position I'd left her in. Somehow, she'd turned over on to her stomach. Her short legs were bent behind her ordinarily enough but her head curved down unnaturally. Her arms shot off in different directions, one crushed beneath her chest, one stiff behind her. She looked like a doll whose porcelain arm had come free of its socket.
Each way I moved her caused her pain, but within minutes she was giggling wherever I pressed my fingers into her and I wondered if she hadn't been putting on an act all the while.
'Cut it out! You'd better be quiet — someone could hear you!'
'Quiet. Tiny. Invisible. Like a little mouse . . .' Her whispering had a melody to it. 'Careful little mousy or someone will twist your head off.'
Her talk of the mouse triggered my memory. 'Those sounds you were making, what in the devil did you think you were doing?'
'Don't get so tetchy and uptight. It's not good for your health, Johannes. My God, it was just a code to let you know I wasn't kibosh! In rigor mortis! Weren't you dying of fear? I mean, for me?'
There was something sly about her question, something I didn't appreciate. 'What do you think, I was jumping with joy?'
'I think . . .' She bit her thumbnail to gain tim
e. 'I think just like you.'
With exaggerated caution, she took a tour of her new flat. Her every precaution came off as sardonic, mean, perverted. She went along as lightly as she could on her tiptoes, holding her index finger to her lips. Every squeak of the wood made her cover her ears, shut her eyes as if she had just stepped on a mine. She ducked under the skylight windows, covering her head with her arms as if someone outside were firing at her. The view consisted mostly of the sky, for this kind of window slanted with the roof rather than stood up vertically out of it like the dormer of her old room. I could only cross my arms and glower at her.
There were only two rooms in the flat, but good-sized, all the more because the ceiling was incomparably higher than the one she'd had before, where bumping your head was inevitable until you'd done it at least three times and good enough to remember. The walls, freshly painted white, gave the place a vacant, uninhabited smell. The kitchenette was in the corner of the west room, the bathroom in the corner of the east. Neither the kitchenette nor the bathroom had windows. Elsa stared miserably at the shower and I couldn't help but gloat. The bath had been a sour point between us, a problem I'd thus eliminated. There was a wardrobe. She peered inside, expecting to find something other than a wire-hanger rattling on the rod. She took off her cardigan and hung it there. Its shoulders sagged dolefully, indicating the way she herself probably felt.
***
There was a settling-in phase, during which Elsa sent me to the hardware store three times a day while she did nothing but sit back, relax and drink, or so I inferred from the glasses and coffee cups I found in the sink when I came back. I ventured to install light fixtures only to discover that the screws I'd chosen were too short. Another trip to and back from the store, then it occurred to me I needed bolts. Without the screw, I couldn't select the right bolt. The salesman asked if I knew the diameter. If I had, I'd not have needed his help. My first accomplishments didn't remain in place for long. How could you expect screws to stay in the walls without Rawlplugs? I gritted my teeth.
Part of my lack of concentration could be blamed on the unreserved manners of people living in a working-class area. More than once I came back to have Elsa tell me someone had come by in my absence. This turned out to be Frau Beyer, who lived with her husband on the ground floor. If it wasn't an egg she needed for her cake, it was a can opener because hers had just broken, or a thermometer to be sure hers wasn't broken, her husband's temperature reading so high. She came to need things, I observed, just after I'd left.
Herr and Frau Campen, who lived with their two young daughters one floor down from us, never bothered us, at least not directly. They fought between themselves like cats and dogs, though — we could hear their arguments as if we were in the same room. They put on loud music when the insults became too cutting, and I knocked the floor with a broom. I was already beginning to behave like the others in the building.
Elsa strained her neck to see out the window, where she could just catch the edge of a building and its first vertical line of windows. She asked me what that old lady in one window sat looking at for long intervals day after day. I had to come up with a diversion — for the last thing I wanted was for her to want this contrivance I'd heard Godmum talk about: a television set. Not only did it rob the world of colours, she said, but it also cost an arm and a leg, so a few imbeciles with nothing better to do with their money could station one in the middle of their sitting rooms. To me, it represented a dangerous window on the outside world Elsa must not find out about or she'd pester me no end. It was pure luck the old lady knitted while she viewed it, allowing me to tell Elsa she was keeping her eye on a pattern propped up in front of her. Elsa soon lost interest in the old woman.
Every day, modern technology was coming up with electronic contraptions. One couldn't walk down Mariahilfer Straße without going by demonstration stands that attracted crowds as big as marionettes used to attract. Since antiquity, air had dried women's hair. Nowadays, a noisy apparatus like a bloated hood could dry it in half the time. Women had once been happy to put their hair into braids, locks or knots. Now common sense was gone. The time they saved drying their hair, they doubled to get it up so it resembled the pompous feather ornament of a royal guard of some distant land, or, more truthfully, a hairy coconut! They applied a foul-scented glue so the stiff immobility made it appear as if hair didn't grow naturally from the body, but had been purchased in a store along with their outrageous outfits. Everything was moving up — their hair, their skirts. Gravity, gone from this earth.
People couldn't mix a batter any more with their own hand. There was even, believe it or not, a contraption for beating an egg! Who on earth ever sprained their wrist beating an egg? And this, I guarantee you, had nothing to do with the maimed generation of the war — they weren't the ones buying these things. Our neighbours were no exception, and because of them, Elsa didn't miss out on all this electronic nonsense — audibly, I mean. With a sarcastic smile, she provided her own explanation: the loud blowing, crushing hums were sounds of war reconstruction.
The modest entrance to our building had beige walls through which one could discern traces of an older navy blue. The low ceiling had a flickering fluorescent light that drove moths crazy till they fell dead. Off to one side were four metal mailboxes, one per floor. The stairs themselves were in tiptop shape because they were waxed each week by Frau Beyer. At best this entrance could be described as plain and functional.
Coming home one day from a series of errands I was stunned as I stepped into the building to note what a change had taken place. Green plants stood around, nearly as tall as me. I touched their leaves, which were too perfectly green and shiny — they weren't artificial. Half the species I didn't recognise. Moving an elephant ear leaf aside, I saw a large mirror, newly secured to the wall.
It had been some time since I'd seen myself close up. I was shocked, and my shocked expression made me look more shocking, which shocked me more. My hairline had taken its first tiny step back in the losing battle. My face — stubbly, drawn — had matured prematurely. Youth had shed its mask and what had been behind it had hardened into another human being. For a second I thought my scar had healed, but then I realised it simply stood out less because I had a permanent redness to me, like a homeless alcoholic.
Frau Beyer came up to me with a mop. 'Oh, don't worry, Herr Betzler, you won't be charged. We voted for these changes before you became an owner. You must admit, though, that this mirror makes the entrée look bigger? My husband says mirrors make walls step back for the queen to pass through.'
'The walls . . .'
'The walls — we haven't voted on their new colour yet. We'll do that at the next meeting of our Owners' Association, on Monday. You'll be there, won't you?'
I scratched up some excuse.
'Oh, I see you've never been an owner before. You have to attend all our meetings, that's where all matters concerning common ownership are decided — the roof, the exterior, all you see down here.'
'I thought my exterior was mine, my windows, walls and roof mine. I'm on the top floor, as you know. I assumed everyone had their own walls to take care of, their own windows.'
'No, no, no,' she laughed. 'It doesn't work like that. The interior's yours, yes, but not the exterior. When renters like you become owners, it's always new to them. The outside of your two windows belong to us all, just like a part of our windows belongs to you. If you owned a house, it would be different; everything would be yours — the roof, windows . . . but of course, that's not the case. Didn't the real estate agent explain this to you?'
I shook my head.
'Well, there's nothing to it. You do get a vote, after all. Only, it's not a democracy. We all vote, but our votes don't count equally. It goes by the size of the place you own. The bigger it is, the more your vote counts. You have the smallest place, so you have the smallest vote. But you needn't work yourself up — it also means that when improvements are voted upon, you have the least to p
ay.' She stepped back to admire the plants. 'I can tell you, there's going to be a lot of argument about these walls . . .'
For every slow step up I took, a multitude of thoughts raced through my mind. I'd assumed that once the flat was bought, I had nothing else to pay. Discovering that other people could decide what I had to pay for, especially for something I didn't even want, set my teeth on edge. If I'd known, I wouldn't have bought those two rooms in the first place. What if they voted for something too expensive for me? Where would I get the money? I'd be forced to go to these meetings and get along with these people.
'Oh, Herr Betzler?' Frau Beyer was smiling up at me. 'I've been meaning to ask you.' With the mop handle she pointed at the card I'd fixed to my mailbox, my fifth attempt to get something I reckoned looked suitable. 'I'll type you one so it's the same as ours. Regulation. Uniformity, essential to the standing of the building. Is "Herr Betzler" all I should type?'
I scrutinised her smile, her rotund belly, the golden buckles on her slip-on shoes, more gold on her fingers, manicured hands wielding the mop, her self-confident manner. What was she getting at? Simply that it would sound better if she put Herr Johannes Betzler? Or used my initials? Her stress had been on my last name, hadn't it? I repeated her question in my mind. No, what she meant was, 'Is your name all I should type?' 'Shouldn't I type the name, too, of that woman living up there with you?' 'Aren't you going to own up to her?' 'Do you think you're hiding from anyone the fact that you and she are unwed?' She wanted me to deny Elsa's existence to her face. I was curt. 'Herr Betzler will do for now.'
Caging Skies Page 31