The meeting took place in the apartment belonging to Friedrich's parents, in their kitchen, where Friedrich, the toddler known in the building for blocking the stairway either single handedly or with the help of his toys, sat beside the table with spoon and pot. His father, Herr Hoefle, explained that the nice people discussing business would get a headache if he didn't stop banging. It was only after Friedrich hit his eye on the table corner that the meeting could begin. This was because his mother, turning her head to catch him rubbing his eye without actually having seen the reason why he was crying, deduced that he was tired and put him to bed, to the great satisfaction of the rest of us who had seen.
A committee was elected to come up with a list of proposed communal improvements. I was to raise my hand if I approved each name as called out by Herr Beyer, Owners' Association president. I wondered who on earth would have the cheek to refuse someone to his face. The men called each other comrade and shook hands as if just elected head of a political party. I couldn't have felt more out of place.
Frau Beyer was right about the walls. Herr Campen wanted them green, but Frau Campen said we needed the walls to move out, not in, so we needed white. Frau Hoefle said Friedrich would dirty the white, as he liked to play in the stairwell. Frau Campen said hands could be washed and Friedrich more closely attended to. Frau Hoefle believed that some things, such as the language one could hear in the stairwell, were dirtier than innocent little fingers. Frau Beyer had dreamt of red stripes, but others said they would make the walls bend and stretch in all sorts of queer ways, depending on whether they were going up and down or sideways, and whether they had been put on straight in the first place. If they weren't, they could apparently even belly-dance. In the end, the Campens voted for white, the Beyers for red stripes, and the Hoefles to keep the walls beige. The whole table looked to me for the deciding vote. I chose the cheapest option: to keep them as they were. It was the first moment I hadn't regretted coming.
Beer and schnapps were served and the general mood became more convivial. I would have liked to leave, but didn't want to be the first to do so. I should have, before I became a conversation piece. What did I do for a job? Did I have children? Had I ever been married? My response was rehearsed: I was unemployed, and for the time being single. Now the questions were directed towards Herr Beyer. Had his son married that divorced American woman? Was he living with her in Cincinnati? When would they come back to Austria?
We were all putting our glasses in the sink, Frau Hoefle unconvincingly insisting we just leave it all, when Herr Hoefle threw me with one question I hadn't been prepared for. 'Do you have a cat or a dog?' Six curious faces turned to examine me.
He had heard I'd sneaked a cat up in my trunk, that's why he was asking. How could I deny it? Maybe it wasn't allowed? What should I say? My heart pounded. 'Yes, I have a cat.'
'Good. As long as you have no dog. We're bringing in new regulations concerning dogs. They can't be in the communal areas without a leash and muzzle.'
This led to a heated debate about whose dog had never bothered whom; yes, but they weren't the ones cleaning the staircase every week; sure, but some people's shoes brought in more grit than little paws; no more than some people's tongues, speaking of which, don't we need a new mat? The old one is looking shabby.
As we left, the men were shaking hands, calling each other comrade again, this time including me. Winking at one another, they said one of these nights the lot of them would come up for a drink. It was a tradition when someone new moved in. I returned upstairs with a heavy heart and new worries to contend with.
xxviii
The very next morning, while Elsa was entertaining herself, or so I guessed from the shot glasses, I bought a cat. It was the biggest one I could find — an orange and white striped tom. I got it at the pound, where it would have been gassed in three days if I hadn't taken it. This would be the reason for any noise anyone heard from my flat while I was out. I should have thought of it before. I passed Frau Hoefle, who'd never seen a cat in a basket before, guessing from the look on her face, perhaps because its meow was halfway between a hungry baby and a wailing woman. In our small-talk, I slipped in a line about having just brought my cat back from the vet, so she wouldn't suspect it was a new acquisition.
Elsa named the cat Karl but more often called him darling, love, my dearest, my everything. She spent hours indulging him in head-to-tail strokes, admiring his symmetrical face until I caught myself thinking ill of the pet. She got up early to tend to his breakfast, hurried through ours with her leg bobbing up and down, impatient to knot socks into snakes, turn her slipper into a mouse with the help of buttons and broom twigs. She changed the bowl of water on the hour; kept the litter box cleaner than our own bathroom, where I often found her hairs in the basin; scrubbed his dish squeaky clean before she filled it anew — while I had to remind her to keep our soap-dish free of soapy water!
Her arms were scratched from pulling socks on them, making them bark, then chomping on Karl's hind legs. She said the socks protected her from his claws. My foot, they did! And, to add insult to injury, they were my socks she was letting him damage! If ever I teased or tickled her, God forbid. 'Ow! You know I bruise easily!' If I was the one to try to rest my head upon her breasts: 'Johannes, no! You weigh a ton! Get off; I can't breathe.'
She would stand with her ankles together and Karl passed between them, getting a rub on both sides. He produced enraptured noises from deep inside, curved his back up high, whereupon his fur rose and his tail became stiff, erect, quite as if he were getting some kind of sexual pleasure out of it. I mentioned this once in complaining about her rejections of my advances, and she said who knew, maybe it was true. Still, she let him do it. At one point I thought the only way to preserve the peace would be for me to befriend Karl myself, but every time I got near him, he slunk off. After a month my patience ran out and I cornered him, lifted him up by the scruff of his neck and made him sit on my lap. The instant I let go to pet him, he scrambled off, getting me good with his hind claws.
After that episode we couldn't find him. Elsa accused me of letting him out. It wasn't until nightfall that she found him in the narrow space behind the kitchen sink. He hissed and spat at her every attempt to reach him. Even shaking the catfood box failed to entice him out. His bowl of water was more persuasive (flung), but she wouldn't thank me. Instead of being cross with him, she didn't speak to me for days — outside of monosyllables, yes, oh, hm, no.
I wanted to get rid of Karl. He tore feathers out of our mattress, played with pencils in the middle of the night, urinated on clothes I hadn't got around to hanging up. No amount of washing removed the stink — that sharp muskiness particular to tomcat urine.
'Listen,' Elsa promised, 'I'll keep an eye on him, punish him if it happens again.'
'I see no reason to wait.' I approached him cautiously. His body tensed.
'Stop! He won't understand why you're punishing him if you do it now. You have to catch him in the act. Besides, I should be the one to do it. He'll understand better if it's me.'
I left my jacket in one of his napping corners and didn't take my eyes off of him. This time my patience was rewarded. I watched him slink over, take position. Elsa was re-attaching a button he'd gnawed off his mouse.
'You'd better move it if you want to catch him in the act,' I advised coldly.
She didn't bother to look up until she'd finished sewing and bitten the thread off. Then, at her leisure, she strolled over to my desk (I call it that by habit; it was no more than a board on trestles), swaying her plump buttocks proudly. She picked up my owner's certificate and rolled it up so it was pointed at the tip. 'Karl, that's a no-no,' she said mildly, and tapped him twice on the hip. She dropped it back on my desk and, with no attempt to flatten it, returned to her mending.
'He pissed on my clothing and he gets two encouraging taps on the back? You ruin as much stuff as he does! I think you're both playing games with me!' All I did was seize a ruler, re
ndering null (by the simplest form of deduction she was so talented at) my threats to 'tear out his limbs one by one'.
She jerked it away and broke it in two over her knee. 'You're so primitive! It's the noise that punishes him, not the pain.'
'You'd be surprised how educational pain can be!' I yelled, but the cat was faster than me. Nevertheless, the bang my shoe made against the wall was, in my opinion, more effective than the swishes Elsa had made.
'You brute!' She beat her fists on my chest — she, who for the life of her wouldn't have harmed a hair on the cat's head. Our shouts of rage brought about bangs from below, which stopped us both. We faced each other as if frozen in time, neither of us able to move. After minutes, or so it seemed, I shifted my eyes to the dent in the wall and said to her through my teeth, 'Look what you made me do.'
By speaking first, I broke the spell. Elsa dropped back in her chair, her short legs spread. Karl hopped up on her fat lap, upon which she voluptuously stroked his underside. He lifted his hind leg and holding it out straight and stiff, licked it. It was a mean provocation, exposing his proud testicles, just when I'd been nurturing feelings of having been castrated by her.
Before dawn, I showed him the way. He slipped out, a sneaky bush of a shadow. I pursued him with his basket and cornered him downstairs under the mailboxes.
It was late morning when I came back. Elsa was pining in the kitchenette, her back to the stove. Her face regained confidence when she saw what I was carrying; her smile was one of victory as she reached out her hands. I handed it over. She drew the cat out, brought it against her shoulder, giving its drowsy face little kisses. She looked at me again; this time she'd seen the shaved patch and understood I'd had him neutered. The girlishness left her expression: the face that remained was true to its age.
The cat grew as fat as her, left its mouse in the middle of the room without a sniff of attention. If Elsa animated the toy by the shoestring tail, the cat lifted its paw once or twice before blinking cynically. It observed birds out the window with a passivity to discredit its species. At night it watched the shadows on the walls with no emotion. Elsa pulled my socks over her hands, made them jump, growl, sniff. The cat was insulted by her diversions. If she persisted, it got up to nap elsewhere. Her outbursts of kisses were now received with half-closed eyes; tolerated, but no longer appreciated.
***
In due time, though, there was less friction between Elsa and me and our mode of life fossilised into a routine. Perhaps in adopting the practical modes of existence one needs once youth is past and buried, we eliminated the inconvenient, and, with it, the spontaneous, the surprises. We got up from bed to go to our kitchenette some steps away. Elsa sliced the previous day's bread, I made the coffee. We sat looking at our plates. We got up. She took care of the cat, I cleaned the kitchen. She took a few steps in the other direction to spend an hour in the bathroom. I made the bed, sat grumbling on it until she came out. She smoothed the bedspread. I bought the beans, she soaked them. In silence we ate them. The cat jumped up on the table. I pushed it off. She cracked the window open. I closed it, complaining that the draught made my neck sore. Seated, we took our afternoon nap. We walked back to the kitchenette, took our tea. We wondered how long until dinner. She took the pot of beans out of the refrigerator. I lifted the cover to look at them. She did some exercises. I watched her because there was nothing else to watch. She read. I went to buy the bread. I came back, played solitaire. She watched me cheat. She put the beans on the gas. We sat. We ate. I cleaned. She helped. We yawned. How long until bedtime? These are my memories of those unchanging days.
Elsa and I found fewer subjects to talk about. We'd used up our stock of conversation. We continued to talk, of course, but it seemed we talked only of the same things we'd already talked about before. I heard the story of her audition for the Vienna Conservatory of Music at least a hundred times. The first round, she'd played as if some great artist's spirit were helping her along. The second, she was so nervous trying to match the preceding performance, her hand shifted a fingertip too far, which on an instrument as exacting as the violin was enough to reduce her to beginner status. By the same token, I'm sure she'd heard about the time Pimmichen and I were both dying until we shared the same bed as many times, if not more.
We'd grown bored with each other. Even the cat had grown bored with us, and dodged its ennui by sleeping. Surely, its life had been more exciting, too, the days it had feared me, feared for its future. Today, if Elsa fed it a titbit under the table and I lifted my arm in rage, it only looked up to see if there wasn't by any chance something edible in my hand. It never explored its environment any more. After all, it already knew every square metre by heart. I knew how it felt. Routine made our home shrink until at times it felt as if we were living in a box. I think the smells were what reduced the space. From the bed, one could smell the beans as strongly as hours ago in the kitchen. From the kitchen, one could smell the shaving cream as if one were in the bathroom. The cat's punctual doings were instantly known to us anywhere in the home, as ours probably were to it. One couldn't do much of anything without all of us knowing about it.
Elsa and I hardly bothered each other by then with physical desire. We were, I truly believe, too physically close ninety-nine per cent of the time to want to get any nearer. In bed, we turned our backs to each other, clinging to our own edges. Rarely, I reached out a hand, and if I did, it was after some off-the-wall dream of a woman I'd never seen before in my life. Elsa couldn't have been more scandalised had I been her own brother. My hand was slapped and thrown back at me like a soiled garden glove.
Elsa could go without me a month at a time, more: maybe this was the way women functioned. Then she would desire me for a day, but with restrictions. She might warm her feet against my legs, but I have an inkling she would've done the same with a fluffy toy animal. As I said, if I was foolish enough to make the first move, I was sure to be rejected. All I could do was wait for however long it took for her to come around, at which time I put myself at her disposal. I swore I'd make her wait next time she started up with her hanky-panky. But when she blew her whistle I came running like a dog. Maybe that was the way men functioned.
I forgot to mention that she was rarely more than partially undressed, and I must say as the months went by, she bothered with such matters even less. If she could move a garment aside, no need to take it off. More often than not she didn't even want to make love, she only wanted to 'borrow my leg', as she put it. To do her justice, she asked me first. This would put me in a state of excitement, but I wasn't allowed to do anything or she gave me a verbal lashing. My role was just to lie there with my arms out to the side. All I could expect from her afterwards was the equally generous possibility of using her leg.
The drip in the kitchen sink was our only indication of days going by. Then again, one drop might have been another drop, just as yesterday could have swapped places with tomorrow or today. Then one morning, a tiny change took place. Without saying a word, I began to slice the bread. With a shrug of her shoulders, Elsa decided she'd make the coffee. I left everything on the table and went into the bathroom first. Coming out, I saw that the bed had been made. We actually smiled at each other. I tended to the cat, she cleaned the kitchen. While she was in the bathroom, I put the beans in the water to soak. I knew she knew I would. When she came out and saw I had, we smiled at each other a second time — twice before noon, a record.
Keeping with the rules of our new game, I was the one to boil the beans for lunch. The cat, seeing something new going on, was naturally curious. It jumped up on the bench and, in dipping its head to sniff around, its whiskers came into contact with the flame, making a horrendous stink. Elsa came to see what it was. As she wiped the black off, she found whiskers like grains of sand in her hand. This led to another surprise. She didn't blame me for it.
That lunch, instead of looking down at our plates, we actually talked. I told Elsa not to worry: Karl's whiskers were as unnecessa
ry to him as mine were to me. Elsa said my analogy fell down: a cat's whiskers were as vital as a pole to a tightrope walker. I found that hilarious, but she said it was exactly like we humans using our ears, not our feet, for balance. I answered that if what she said was true, Karl should be currently leaning to one side or walking around in circles. I don't know why, but we were soon laughing ourselves out of breath like children. Every time we looked at Karl waiting for his titbit, with long proud whiskers on one side, and on the other the atrophied ones resembling the bristles on an overused toothbrush, we exploded into a fresh gust, especially when our behaviour prompted him to seesaw his head over to the long-whiskered side. Vexed, Karl removed himself from view. Elsa opened the windows and, instead of shutting them, I for once let them be.
That afternoon nap, it was as if we knew each other for the first time. It was wondrous because she and I were our same old selves, yet because we'd kept away from each other for so long, in coming together we forgot to hate what long ago we used to love. It was a rare fruit to cherish novelty while sharing the ease that only familiarity can beget. I held Elsa to me and the warming wind blew away old grudges, breathed revitalisation into our souls. A bird was chirping and I fell asleep swooping into pastel skies and sweet melodies.
On waking, I didn't notice the water until getting out of bed, I stepped into it; a shallow expanse resembling the thinnest lip of the sea that steals its way up the shore before being drawn away. This water didn't recede, though; contrarily, it only edged itself forward in wee spasms, millimetre by millimetre. Against all reason, Elsa had tried to lie down in a plastic basin I normally used to keep my belts, socks and the like. She'd merely succeeded in wedging her torso and head in, while her legs and one arm stuck out ludicrously, the other arm bending to pinch her nose. The showerhead was trapped somewhere under her, which had caused the hose to crack; jets of water were spurting out its length in grand arcs. The water level rose and fell over the edge, making her hair undulate back and forth and her features distort.
Caging Skies Page 32