All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  Surprisingly, after that one, only their second, Hans-Pieter makes his excuses and leaves Murray there on his own, to have another half-litre of Pan, the local industrial lager, and survey the square in unexpected solitude.

  That Hans-Pieter has something else to do is a surprise. The underlying premise of their friendship is that neither of them ever has anything else to do. No one else to see. There is no one else. That’s why they are friends. Take that away, and it’s not obvious what would be left.

  Actually, it’s not quite true that there is no one else. There’s Damjan. An acquaintance of Hans-Pieter, a native. Damjan has a job though – he works at a tyre-fitting shop next to the train tracks. He has a family. He has, in other words, what passes for an ordinary life.

  Murray meets him later in the bar of the Umorni Putnik.

  Murray is disappointed, arriving there, that Maria isn’t around. Inasmuch as Murray has a purpose in his life now, that purpose involves Maria, who serves drinks in the youth hostel. She is not, he feels, out of his league. For one thing, she is not very attractive. She is young and friendly, and her English is excellent – she even understands Murray when he speaks. He has had his eye on her for some time, since last winter. All year he has been planning to make his move.

  He was particularly hoping to find her there this evening. He feels down. Outside, it is already dark. The evenings are shortening now. The nights, as they say, are drawing in.

  He sees Damjan arrive.

  ‘Damjan, mate,’ Murray says, standing eagerly to shake the tyre-fitter’s hand.

  Damjan is short, muscular, untalkative – the sort of man that Murray instinctively defers to.

  Damjan, while still shaking Murray’s hand, looks around. ‘Hans-Pieter?’ he asks.

  ‘Not here,’ Murray tells him. ‘I dunno where the fuck he is. Lemme get you a drink.’

  ‘So,’ Murray says, when they are sitting down. ‘What you been up to then?’

  ‘What you been up to?’ Murray asks again when Damjan says nothing. ‘What you been doing?’

  Damjan, perhaps still not understanding, shrugs, shakes his head.

  ‘You’re okay, though?’ Murray asks.

  ‘Okay, yes.’

  This is in fact the first time they have had a drink together without Hans-Pieter being there. It turns out to be surprisingly hard work.

  They end up talking about tyres.

  ‘So what about Pirelli?’ Murray finds himself asking. ‘How do they compare? With Firestone, say.’

  Increasingly, there are long silences, during which they separately survey the room, trying to find a woman worth looking at.

  Then Murray asks another question about tyres, which Damjan dutifully answers.

  They have been talking about tyres for almost an hour.

  ‘I had Mitchell-in on the Merc,’ Murray says, after a long pause. ‘Top quality.’

  Damjan just nods, drinks.

  ‘D’you think we’re going to see Hans-Pieter tonight?’ Murray asks.

  Damjan shrugs.

  ‘You don’t know where he is?’

  Damjan, lifting his drink, shakes his head.

  Which, it turns out later, is a sort of lie. He knows more or less where Hans-Pieter is. Hans-Pieter is at Maria’s flat, naked, watching an episode of Game of Thrones dubbed into Croatian on Maria’s squat little TV.

  3

  In the morning, autumn has arrived. The temperature has fallen twenty degrees overnight. Surveying it from his window, in pants and vest, Murray is triumphant. He looks forward to shoving this turbulent autumn day, full of wet leaves, in Hans-Pieter’s face and saying, ‘So what about this then? You fancy an ice cream now, ya fucking parasite?’ He starts to smile, until an eruption of coughing knobbles him and he turns from the window trying to force out the word Fuck as he doubles over and the veins in his temples swell and throb.

  ‘FUCK!’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Silence settles on the flat, like dust. He found it, the flat, with Hans-Pieter’s help, about a month after arriving in the town. His landlord is a middle-aged man whose mother lived here until she died, and most of her stuff is still in place – vast dark wooden furniture looms in the two rooms. Down at floor level Murray lurks among the old lady’s pictures and knick-knacks, her pedal-operated sewing machine, her damp bedding. He had wanted it fully furnished. He uses her old steel knives and forks, her stained plates. There are even, on the walls, some framed photos of people in old-fashioned clothes, strangers with grave sepia faces.

  The flat is still full of warm, stale air. The flapping grey scene outside its two grand windows seems disconnected from the tepid silence of the interior. It seems weird, histrionic. Rain comes at the windowpanes like handfuls of pebbles. Murray lights a cigarette. He smokes a local brand now – to that extent he has gone native. He sits in the hot shaft of the bathroom, surrounded by rust-furred piping, discoloured tilework, a light bulb burning high overhead.

  Afterwards, he dresses, and wrestles an umbrella the short distance to the Umorni Putnik.

  Hans-Pieter is there, having breakfast at a table in the shadowy bar. A coffee, a buttered bread roll. He seems to be staring at a point about two feet in front of his eyes. Fucking space cadet, Murray thinks.

  Without acknowledging his friend, he addresses himself to the bar, where Ester is on duty. Ester – she is out of his league.

  She’s pals with Maria, though, so it’s probably worth keeping in with her: Murray smiles.

  He feels the insufficiency of that smile himself, sees its insufficiency for a moment in the deep murky shadows of the mirror behind her. (The price list is written directly onto the mirror – his face peers out from among the numbers.)

  ‘Yes?’ Ester says.

  ‘Cappuccino,’ Murray’s face says, in English.

  While she works the machine, he looks at a local newspaper. The words mean nothing to him, his eyes drop from picture to picture. Pictures of local politicians – mean-looking men with terrible haircuts trying to smile, as he has just tried to, and with, for the most part, a similar lack of plausibility.

  When he has his cappuccino, he joins Hans-Pieter. ‘Morning,’ Murray says, mutters, taking a seat opposite his friend.

  Hans-Pieter, his mouth full, just nods.

  He seems to be force-feeding himself a bread roll.

  Murray regards him with distaste for a few moments. ‘Where were you last night then?’ he asks finally.

  Hans-Pieter is swallowing the bread in his mouth. He tries to speak prematurely and the words are indistinct.

  Murray squints at him irritably. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Ammarias,’ Hans-Pieter says, swallowing.

  ‘What?’

  Hans-Pieter swallows properly. ‘Maria’s. At Maria’s flat.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  Hans-Pieter is unable to hold Murray’s stare. ‘You know – Maria?’

  ‘Maria,’ Murray says, struggling, it seems, to understand who they are talking about, ‘who works here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  You were at her flat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ Murray asks, sincerely puzzled.

  ‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter laughs shyly. ‘You know …’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  ‘We’ve … We’ve got something going,’ Hans-Pieter says.

  Murray, for a moment, looks totally nonplussed. ‘What – you?’

  Hans-Pieter nods.

  ‘You and Maria?’

  Hans-Pieter looks down. ‘Well, yes,’ he admits. He seems embarrassed. And it might be that he misunderstands Murray’s perspective. Maria is twenty years younger than Hans-Pieter, more or less. She is overweight and unattractive. Things that are, potentially, sources of embarrassment.

  ‘How did that happen?’ Murray says. He has turned quite pale.

  Last Friday night, Hans-Pieter tells him, he was there in the Umorni Putnik until it shut, as he usually is, and it was pi
ssing down outside, and she didn’t have an umbrella – she was waiting for it to stop, so he suggested she come up to his room and wait there, have a smoke, and she did, and they ended up spending the night together. Since then, he tells Murray, he has twice spent the night at her flat.

  ‘That’s it,’ Hans-Pieter says.

  He starts on his second bread roll.

  For some time Murray says nothing.

  The little trees in the street outside shake and sway.

  At the shadow-draped bar, Ester is talking to someone on her phone, laughing.

  And I was at Beckie’s place, Murray thinks, trying to sleep. The Spider-Man duvet. And they were. At that same moment. Last Friday.

  He is staring at Hans-Pieter with an expression of shocked loathing. ‘What the fuck does she see in you?’ he says.

  What does she see in Hans-Pieter? The question keeps Murray awake that night. He sits there, in the tall mausoleum-like spaces of his flat, smoking in the darkness. What seems obvious to him is that if he had only made his own intentions plainer, sooner, he and not Hans-Pieter would have her. That thought torments him for a while. Not that he even particularly wants to have her in any physical sense. There was something limply sentimental, something vague, something almost like pity, about his feelings for Maria. And what she sees in Hans-Pieter is obvious enough – Hans-Pieter is just a lesser version of himself, a poor woman’s Murray. A foreigner from somewhere further west, with at least some money. Hans-Pieter even has a car – an old rust-perforated 1.2 litre Volkswagen Polo, leaking oil in a side street. In the context of the Umorni Putnik, that makes him a more or less plausible sugar daddy.

  He’s welcome to her, Murray decides.

  He’s welcome to the fat tart.

  And the good thing is, this will give him more time to focus on his business interests. Which is what he should be doing anyway, not messing about with floozies. His business interests. Airport transfers. Minibus to Zagreb airport. Blago has the drivers lined up. He has the advertising lined up. The website is ready to go. He just needs the minibuses. He has enough for one, he says, but he needs four to make the business viable. So he offered Murray the opportunity to invest. They talked about it in Džoker, and then over lunch. Put in the money for the minibuses, get a fifty per cent stake, was Blago’s proposal. And sitting in an HSBC in Kingston upon Thames last Wednesday, Murray had finalised the loan, against the house in Cheam, and transferred the money to the account of Slavonski Zračne Luke d.o.o., the details of which – IBAN number and so forth – Blago had provided for him. Blago has shown him the minibuses he intends to buy – ex-police vehicles he found online, for sale in Osijek. Said he’d be going down there to get them just as soon as the money arrives. Murray said he wanted to come with him, to see the vehicles for himself. ‘I know a thing or two about that,’ he had told Blago. He had insisted on having a veto, if he didn’t think they were up to scratch.

  He has tried Blago’s phone once or twice since he got back from the UK, to find out if the money has arrived.

  No answer. That was typical Blago.

  *

  The most pressing issue, he finds, is the Hans-Pieter-shaped hole in his own days, which he now mostly drifts through alone. They used to meet every morning in the Umorni Putnik. These days, most of the time, Hans-Pieter isn’t there. Murray drinks his cappuccino, while pretending to look at the paper. He stays there for more than an hour, sometimes.

  Occasionally Hans-Pieter does show up. One morning, when he does, Murrays says to him, ‘What you up to later then?’ Which is what he always used to say – and the answer would always be words to the effect of ‘not much’, and they would agree to meet at Džoker ‘later’, meaning some time fairly soon after lunch.

  Today, however, Hans-Pieter just shrugs.

  When Murray suggests a drink in Džoker ‘later’, Hans-Pieter is initially evasive, and then says something about a film he’s planning to see.

  ‘Oh?’ Murray says. ‘What you seeing?’

  Iron Man 3, Hans-Pieter tells him.

  There is a silence. Then Murray says, ‘Mind if I come along?’

  Another silence. Hans-Pieter says, not particularly warmly, ‘If you want.’

  ‘If it’s okay with you,’ Murray says.

  Hans-Pieter looks down at his Adidas trainers. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Where shou’ we meet then?’ Murray asks.

  ‘Here?’ Hans-Pieter suggests, without enthusiasm.

  So they meet there, in the middle of the afternoon, Hans-Pieter and Maria arriving together.

  Maria does not seem pleased to see him – to see Murray, waiting there in his slacks. He tries to be friendly. She isn’t having it. She hardly says a word on the bus out to the edge of town, where there is a tatty shopping mall with a few screens embedded in it.

  It is then, strap-hanging, that Murray starts to wonder whether this was really such a good idea. The others seem to be deliberately not looking at him. When his and Maria’s eyes meet, he tries to smile at her. She looks away immediately and he asks her about the film. ‘So what we going to see then?’ he says. ‘Is it any good?’ She pretends not to hear him.

  Most of the other people in the ticket queue are kids – lads with faceted glass earrings and sagging waistbands and shrieking ladesses in tiny skirts or tracksuits, slurping sugary drinks and throwing popcorn at each other. Among these high-spirited youngsters, with Hans-Pieter and Maria sometimes snogging next to him, Murray sits for two hours, watching the noisy action film. It is dubbed in Croatian and he understands fuck-all.

  Afterwards, while Maria is in the ladies, Hans-Pieter tells him they’re going back to her place, and asks Murray what he’s going to do.

  ‘I dunno,’ Murray says, just standing there in the foyer.

  There is a short silence and Murray has the appalling feeling that Hans-Pieter is pitying him – that fucking Hans-Pieter is feeling sorry for him.

  Well, fuck that.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he says. ‘I’ve got things to do. You give her one from me, okay?’ And with an unpleasant smile, he nods towards Maria, who is approaching them.

  He spends the next few hours in Džoker, drinking Pan lager and thinking, If the likes of Hans-Pieter can sort himself out with a woman, then I sure as fuck can.

  Matteus nods.

  Without meaning to, Murray had said it aloud. Matteus, tall and austere, possessor of a monastic vibe, is taking glasses out of the dishwasher and putting them on a shelf under the bar.

  It is not even eight o’clock, and Murray is already quite drunk.

  In Oaza later, he happens on Damjan.

  They are sitting at a table together in the kebab shop and Murray is saying, ‘If the likes of Hans-Pieter can sort himself out with a woman, then I sure as fuck can.’ Inelegantly, he is eating a kebab.

  Damjan says, ‘Sure.’ He and his friend have already finished, were about to leave when Murray arrived. They talk in Croatian, the two of them – a muttered wry exchange of words. Murray, shoving the last wet mess of the kebab into his mouth, wonders what they are talking about.

  ‘What you gonna do now?’ he asks, wiping his lips with a paper napkin.

  Damjan’s friend, it turns out, speaks perfect English. He sounds like an American.

  ‘We’re gonna go party,’ he says, grinning. ‘You wanna come?’

  ‘Fuck, yeah,’ Murray says. ‘Good man. Let’s go.’

  As they leave, one of the twins says something to Damjan.

  The kebab shop is owned by Albanian twins, identical, of vaguely thuggish appearance. Shaved, spherical heads. Fleshy noses. Strong necks and heavy eyebrows. Murray can never tell them apart. At first he didn’t realise there were two of them; then one day he saw them together. They usually sit out on the terrace in front, under the awning where a water-feature tinkles, puffing at a hookah and drinking tea. Other, more desperate-looking men – often with moustaches – hang out with them there, and any number of women, young and old. A s
ouped-up white Honda Accord EX 2.2 litre diesel is frequently parked in front of the shop, which Murray assumes must be owned by one of them.

  And he envies the way one of them nods at Damjan as they leave, and offers him a few words of farewell. He wishes the twins would acknowledge him like that. He has been eating their kebabs for over a year, and he has always felt that he and they share something, something that sets them apart from the other people in this place, a superiority of some sort. And yet they never speak to him, as one of them just spoke to Damjan, or acknowledge him in any way.

  On the spur of the moment Murray decides that he will be the first to speak. The twin who spoke to Damjan is standing there, near the door, slouching against the jamb, and poking about in his mouth with a toothpick.

  ‘Alright,’ Murray says to him, forcefully he hopes, as he passes him on the way out.

  And the twin just looks slightly surprised – in his collarless shirt, his tan leather jacket – and watches Murray leave.

  And how the fuck did that happen?

  Safely in his mausoleum, hugging the toilet, Murray weeps. Drops tears onto the filthy floor.

  How did that happen?

  He has never been so intimate with the root of this toilet, with the rusty bolts that hold it to the old linoleum.

  He sits up, after a while, and dries his eyes.

  He inspects, in the mirror, his fat lip.

  This mirror always gives the impression of fog. His face looms out of it, damaged. He stares at himself with contempt.

  There was a woman. Aye, there was a woman. There were lots of women. With Damjan and his friend he had trawled through the nightspots of the town – two or three of them, there were. Nightspots. Full of students, kids. No success there, though he had tried, God knows. He had tried in the noise of the new music to have it off with a few of them. Kids with dyed hair. And Murray leering over them, trying to make himself understood. Shouting about the S-Class he had once owned. Shouting, ‘You been to London?’ Shouting, ‘I’ll show you round, okay?’ He had offered her a job, that one. And she was about to give him her number, he thinks, when her friends pulled her away. (Later, seen her being sick in the car park. Was it her?) Damjan’s friend disappeared. So just him and Damjan went on to the all-night place. ‘I know one place,’ Damjan said, speaking more fluently than usual. ‘I know one place is open all night.’ Taxi. Yes, taxi. And then tumble out into the raw air again. Damjan paying. ‘You got any smokes?’ Murray asking him. And then the place. The woman, perched up there on her stool. Not a kid, this one. Or maybe he was perched on the stool and she was there, suddenly, talking to him. And he was telling her about the S-Class he had once owned. Asking her, ‘You been to London?’ She was, what? Forty? Fifty? And no oil painting. Even then, in the state he was in, he knew that. She kept touching him. Hand on his leg. (And where was Damjan?) Hand on his leg. And he said to her, straight out, ‘You wanna come back to mine?’