All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  ‘Yes, it was fine.’

  ‘From Katowice?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re staying tonight in a place called Trennfeld,’ he says, soldiering on with the sandwich. ‘It’s a couple of hours’ drive from here. According to Google maps anyway.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Gasthaus Sonne,’ he says.

  Though she smiles at him, something seems to be wrong.

  ‘Okay?’ he says.

  She smiles at him again, and he wonders if it’s just him – is he just imagining it, or does she seem nervous about something?

  ‘Let’s go?’ she says.

  He takes her little suitcase and they leave and walk to the car park, where she inspects, without passion, the huge scuff on the side of her father’s new car.

  He sighs theatrically.

  ‘See?’

  ‘M-hm.’

  ‘I hope your father won’t be too pissed off,’ he says again.

  It starts to rain as he walks to the machine by the chain-link fence and pushes euros into it to pay for his stay.

  When he comes back, she is sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.

  There is some trouble about getting back to the E42 towards Frankfurt. They spend some time lost in dung-strewn lanes, the dull farm country.

  When they are finally on the motorway, they travel at first in silence, as though hypnotised by the movement of the wipers, which are struggling to keep up with a downpour.

  He is still thinking about the damage.

  About how easily it might not have happened. If he had only arrived a few minutes earlier or later, for instance, he would surely have found a different place to park. There was one slightly tricky space near the entrance that he had almost taken – then he kept on looking, though the space he ended up in, after a few minutes of irritable prowling, was even tighter.

  He had needed a piss. That might also have played its part – the way it made him still more impatient and unfocused on what he was doing. And he was tired and hungry and in a hurry and had been stuck behind a tractor for ten minutes while he tried to find the airport. And all of these factors, all of these individually unlikely or indecisive factors had united in the fateful moment, had placed him exactly then and there, and the damage was done.

  And what will happen about it?

  He will have to pay to have the fucking …

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Karel,’ she says.

  He doesn’t quite understand the emphasis, has forgotten that he used the same phrase himself, half an hour earlier, in the airport.

  ‘What?’

  A long silence.

  He is still thinking about how much the paint job will be, and whether Stańko knows someone who can do it for less than the usual price, when he notices that the silence is still going on.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she had said.

  And the number of things she might have to tell him shrinks, as the silence extends, until there are only one or two left.

  One part of his mind takes that in; the other part is still energetically fretting over the scraped wing.

  She is either about to end their little affair, their succession of tousled hotel-rooms, or

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ he says, throwing the indicator lever, moving out to overtake in a tunnel of spray.

  He hopes that she will immediately negative this.

  Instead the silence just prolongs further.

  Outside, a wet, grey world unfurls around them, wind-whacked trees huddling at its edges, pouring into peripheral vision.

  Part of him is still doggedly preoccupied with the prang. That is starting to drift away, though, as if into infinite space.

  ‘Are you?’ he asks.

  Those moments when everything changes. How many in a life? Not more than a few.

  Here, now, the moment. On this rainswept German motorway. Here and now.

  ‘That’s shit,’ he says, still searching the road ahead with agitated eyes.

  Finally she had spoken. ‘I think so,’ she said. And then, ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s shit,’ he says again.

  The prang is far off now, though he is still just about aware of it, like some object far out in the darkness.

  His whole life seems to be out there, divested.

  What is left? What is he to wrap himself in, now that everything has floated off into space?

  It hangs out there, in the darkness, like debris.

  She is, he notices, shaking with sobs.

  It takes him by surprise.

  And then she starts, still sobbing, to hit her own forehead with a small white-knuckled fist.

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Stop that.’

  ‘Stop the car,’ she says through tears.

  And then screams at him, ‘STOP THE CAR!’

  ‘Why?’ His voice is shrill and frightened. ‘Why? I can’t … What the fuck are you doing?’

  She had started to open the passenger door. Wind noise roared at her. Cold air and water were sucked momentarily into the civilised leather interior.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’

  Her tears redouble and she says, piteously now, ‘Stop the car, stop the car …’

  He stares more frazzledly at the oncoming world. Suddenly it seems unrecognisable. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘Why?’

  She has started to hit her forehead again, her fist knocking on the taut pale skin with a sound that inordinately upsets him.

  And then an Aral station’s lit pylon looms out of the rain – the blue word ARAL high above everything – and, indicating, he slows into the lake of the exit lane.

  As soon as the car stops moving, or even a moment before, she is out of it.

  He sees her, through the still-working wipers, walk away, hugging herself, and wonders numbly what to do.

  He had just stopped on the apron of tarmac short of the petrol station. Now he lifts his foot from the brake and the car moves on at walking pace, under the huge canopy that protects the pumps from the rain.

  He has lost sight of her.

  One of the parking spaces in front of the shop is empty and he slides straight into it. With his thumb he shoves the button that kills the engine and then just sits there for a few minutes. That is, for a fairly long time. The life of the service station swirls around him, as if in time lapse. He is staring at the stitching of the steering wheel, the elegant leather. There is a temptation just to drive away – drive back to his own life, which feels as if it is somewhere else.

  There is no question of actually doing that, however.

  Instead he discovers he has tears in his eyes.

  Tears just sort of sitting there.

  Tears of shock.

  Inside the shop, he peers about, looking for her. He hangs around outside the ladies for a minute or two, as if she might emerge. He tries her phone.

  He starts to worry that she might have done something silly. That she might have taken a lift from a stranger or something.

  He is in the car again, moving slowly through the acres of parked trucks along the side of the motorway, when he finds her. She is still walking. Walking with purpose. She must have been walking, all this time.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he shouts through the open window, keeping pace with her.

  She ignores him.

  He overtakes her and pulls into a space among the trucks some way ahead. He sits there for a few seconds, fighting a furious urge to just drive away. Instead, getting out of the car and hunching his shoulders against the rain, he takes his umbrella from the back seat. It bangs into place above him, and immediately fills with sound.

  As soon as she notices it – it is very large and has ‘University of Oxford’ written on it – she turns and starts to walk the other way.

  Only for show – he is able, with no more than a slight quickening of his pace, to draw level with her, and take hold of her arm.

  A truck lumbers past and he dr
ags her out of the way of its spray, into the puddled alley formed by two other, stationary trucks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he says. ‘Where are you going?’

  Her face is twisted into an unfamiliar tear-drenched ugliness.

  This whole situation, this awful scene among the trucks, has taken him totally by surprise.

  He waits for her to say something.

  Finally she says, ‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Away from you.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Why?’

  It has been his assumption, from the first moment, that there will be an abortion, that that is what she wants as well.

  Now he starts to see, as if it is something still far away, that that may not be so. It is initially just something that his mind, working through every possible permutation in its machine-like effort to understand, throws up as a potential explanation for what she is doing. She does not want to have an abortion. She is not willing to have an abortion.

  In a sense this is the true moment of shock.

  He fights off a splurge of panic.

  She has not said anything, is still just sobbing in the noisy tent of the umbrella.

  He asks, trying to sound loving or sympathetic or something, ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘You can’t make me have an abortion,’ she says.

  He wonders, Is she a Catholic? A proper Catholic? She is Polish, after all. They have never talked about it.

  ‘I don’t want to make you do anything,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, you do. You want me to have an abortion.’

  This he does not deny. It is not, after all, the same thing.

  He says again, ‘What do you want?’

  And then when she says nothing, ‘It’s true. I don’t think you should keep … Fuck, stop!’

  She has tried to pull away from him, to leave the shelter of the umbrella. He is holding her arm now, tightly, and saying to her, ‘Think about it! Think about what it would mean. It might fuck up your whole life …’

  She shouts into his face, ‘You already have fucked up my whole life.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have fucked up my whole life,’ she says.

  ‘How?’ He asks again, ‘How?’

  ‘By saying that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you said.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘“That’s shit,”’ she says.

  His face is a mad mask of incomprehension.

  ‘You said that!’

  Yes, he did say that.

  She is sobbing again, violently, next to the towering snout of a truck. Droplets hang on the truck’s snout. He sees them, hanging there, white. They shake, and some of them fall, as a moment of fierce wind hits everything. Some of them fall. Some of them don’t. They hold on, shaking. He says, loosening his hold on her shaking arm, just wanting to end this awful episode among the trucks, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that.’

  *

  It seems so smooth, the way it moves on the endless tarmac. Whispering wheels. It is quiet. No one seems to have anything to say. Not even the weather now. For some kilometres a light mist comes off the motorway, and then it is just blandly dry.

  Pearl-grey afternoon.

  At Mainz, they cross the Rhine.

  He knows Mainz as the city where Gutenberg invented printing, and thus ended the Middle Ages; that was what they decided, anyway, at a seminar he attended at Bologna University some years ago, The Middle Ages: Approaching the Question of a Terminal Date. He was asked, afterwards, to write an introduction to their transcripted proceedings.

  He finds himself thinking about that, about the terminal date of the Middle Ages, as they pass across the Weisenauer Rheinbrücke, the water on either side a sluggish khaki.

  Modernity was what happened next.

  Modernity, which has never much interested him. Modernity, what’s happening now.

  It started here in Mainz.

  And the Roman Empire ended here – from here the legions tried to outstare the tribes on the other side of the demarcating waterway, where now there is the Opel factory at Rüsselsheim, and a little further on Frankfurt airport, the actual airport, an enormity flanking the motorway for five whole minutes.

  And the weather darkens again as they leave the airport behind.

  What has been said in the last hour?

  Nothing.

  Nothing has been said.

  Pine forests on hillsides start to envelop them on the east side of the Main. And fog.

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  Ché la diritta via era smarrita

  Well, here it is. Dark pine forests, hemming the motorway. Shapes of fog throw themselves at the windscreen.

  Finally someone speaks. He says, ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘A few days ago,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to tell you on the phone.’

  ‘No.’

  A few more minutes, and then he says, ‘And is it mine? Are you sure it’s mine? I have to ask.’

  She says nothing.

  ‘Well, I just don’t know, do I?’ he says.

  *

  Sex happens, surprisingly, at the Gasthaus Sonne in Trennfeld. It’s what they always do – hurry to the hired space to undress. It’s what they always do, and they do it now out of habit, not knowing what else to do when they are alone in the hotel room. This time, however, he makes no effort to please her. He wants her to dislike him. If she decides she dislikes him, he thinks, she may decide that she does not want this pregnancy. He is hurried, forceful, almost violent. And when she is in tears afterwards, he feels awful and sits on the toilet with his head in his hands.

  It took them an hour to find Trennfeld in the fog – a village of tall half-timbered houses on a steep bluff above the Main. Every second house with a sign saying Zimmer Frei. A few more formal inns – with parking space in front and paths down to the river at the back – in one of which they have a room.

  He had told her, as they picked their way through the fog, that she should not assume, should she decide to keep this child, that it would mean they would stay together. It would not necessarily mean that. Not at all. It was only fair, he said, that he should tell her that.

  She said nothing.

  She had said little or nothing for the last two hours.

  Then she said, ‘You don’t understand.’

  Sliding across a mysterious foggy junction, he said, ‘What don’t I understand?’

  ‘That I love you,’ she said drily.

  Well, she would say that, he thought, wouldn’t she. Still, his hands took a firmer hold on the wheel.

  A sign at the roadside told them, then, that they had arrived at Trennfeld.

  And there it was, the picturesque street of half-timbered houses. The Gasthaus Sonne. The low-beamed reception area. The narrow stairs with the Internet router flickering on the wall, up which the smiling Frau led them to their room.

  She had a shower and found him lying on the bed, on the grape-coloured counterpane, waiting for her.

  Later, when he emerges from the bathroom’s rose-tiled box, she is still crying, naked except for the coverlet that she has pulled partially over herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. It does not sound very sincere so he says it again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s just,’ he says, ‘this is such a shock. To me.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a shock to me?’ There is a pillow over her head. Her voice is muffled, tear-clogged, defiant.

  He looks from her pale shoulders to the insipid watercolour on the orange wall.

  ‘Of course it is,’ he says. ‘That’s why we need to think about this. We need to think about it seriously. I mean …’ He wonders how to put this. ‘You need to think about your life.’

  He knows she is ambitious. She is a TV journalist – pops up on the local Kraków news interviewing farmers about the drought, or the mayor of some nearby
town about his new leisure centre and how he managed to snare matching funds from the European Union. She is only twenty-five, and she is sort of famous, in the Kraków area. (She probably makes more money than he does, now he thinks about it.) People say hello to her in the street sometimes, point to her on the shopping-centre escalator. He was there when that happened. ‘What was that about?’ he said. ‘You’re famous?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not really.’

  She is though, and she wants more. He knows that.

  ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’ he asks.

  *

  They spend a few hours in the dim, curtained room as the afternoon wears on. Nothing outside the room, on the other side of the crimson curtains, which glow dully with the daylight pressing on them from without, seems to have any significance. The room itself seems pregnant, swollen with futures in the blood-dim light.

  And the light persists. It is high summer. The evenings last for ever.

  Finally, as if outstared by the sun, they dress and leave.

  Outside it is warm and humid. They start to walk up the picturesque half-timbered street. There are some other people around, people strolling in the evening, and on the terraces of the two or three inns, people.

  She has said nothing. He feels, however, he feels more and more, that when she thinks about the situation, she will see that it would not be sensible to keep it. It would just not be sensible. And she is sensible. He knows that about her. She is not sentimental. She takes her own life seriously. Has plans for herself, is successfully putting them in train. It is one of the things he likes about her.

  He notices that there are cigarette vending machines, several of them, in the street, out in the open. They look strange among the fairytale houses. A village of neurotic smokers. He would like to have a cigarette himself. Sometimes, in extremis, he still smokes.

  Nothing seems very solid, and in fact there is a mist, nearly imperceptible, hanging in the street as the warm evening sucks the moisture out of the wet earth.

  They sit down at a table on one of the terraces.

  He wonders what to talk about. Should he just talk about anything? About this pretty place? About the high steep roofs of the houses? About the carved gables? About the long day he has had? About what they might do tomorrow?