by Takis Würger
“Blue cheese or soft cheese?” asked the salesman.
“Soft.”
She leaned over and spoke quietly in my ear: “I didn’t know what the guy was talking about, either.”
We both smiled, and sat down opposite each other, chewing.
“Charlotte,” she said, and held out her hand. I wiped the mayonnaise off my forefinger.
“Hans.”
“It’s from riding,” she said, pinching her shoulder muscles.
“What?”
“I’m an equestrian, so I do weight training. That’s why my shoulders look the way they do.”
For a moment I thought I saw her smile. Her hand was sticky.
“Thank you for paying for all this,” I said.
She laughed as if I was joking.
We took the Underground to Sloane Square and walked from there to Charlotte’s house. It was too big.
“I’m glad we have servants,” she said, before we went in. “Otherwise I’d feel lonely here when I come to visit my father.”
“You have servants?”
She laughed. “Embarrassing, isn’t it?” Charlotte shifted from foot to foot. “What’s your home like?” she asked.
“I don’t have a home.”
“Where did you grow up, then?”
“I haven’t been back there for a long time. A house in the forest. I miss it. Smaller than this.”
Neither of us knew what to say. Charlotte saved the moment before it got even more embarrassing.
“When Joyce, our cook, was a child in Jamaica, she learned how to make a superb Yorkshire pudding from English farmers on a sugarcane plantation.”
“You have a cook from Jamaica?”
“Sometimes, when I come home, she sings Harry Belafonte.”
A woman opened the door, smiling broadly.
“She’s seen us,” Charlotte said.
Joyce gave Charlotte a hug. She smelled of nutmeg. She nodded at me and said something in a strong accent, then went back into the kitchen, turning at the door and twinkling at Charlotte. We heard her singing quietly, a song about a little girl in Kingston town.
Charlotte took me up to the attic and opened a trunk full of shirts. She rummaged around in it, messing it up.
“My father put these aside to wear when he does the gardening.”
“I see.”
“He never does any gardening.”
The shirts had been tailor-made for her father and had the initials AF on the left cuff. She handed me one.
“Put it on.”
“Here?”
“Are you embarrassed to do it in front of me?”
As I took off my T-shirt I noticed Charlotte looking at my stomach muscles.
“Get the tailor to cut out the monogram,” she said. She took a pile of shirts and gave them to me. “Father won’t notice.”
She paused for a moment and took my free hand. It was an intimate gesture, and I didn’t know whether to return the pressure of her fingers.
“Listen, Hans. My father is a member of the Pitt Club. If he nominates you, you’re in. Please can you talk a bit more this evening, not just say ‘yes’ and ‘thanks’?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you winding me up?”
She didn’t let go of my hand, nor I hers. I spoke quietly, looking past her.
“But I don’t know your father. What is all this?”
“You’ll find out.”
“I mean, what’s so important that I have to lie to your father?”
She squeezed my hand.
“It is important. Just believe me.”
“Charlotte, I—” I said, but she turned and dragged me across the attic. It was only at the top of the staircase that she let go of my hand.
Charlotte
Once a week I met up with a Chinese student and lied to him. We were doing a language exchange, talking about our daily lives, half an hour in English and half an hour in Chinese. The Chinese man called himself Peter because he said his real name was too complicated.
I didn’t understand much when he spoke Chinese, though I didn’t admit that to him. Then he would start speaking English, and it was perfect. He stressed every syllable, like a butler in the royal household.
Peter liked to talk about himself. He told me his father owned a company that manufactured controller chips for airplanes and medium-range ballistic missiles. He was an only child, a triathlete, and when he finished school he’d had to decide between Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge—he was accepted by all the universities he applied to. He said the president of Harvard had sent him a handwritten letter begging him to accept a place. He’d had the best exam results in the whole of northern China. Newspapers had written about him. He’d come to England because he liked rugby and orange marmalade, and he’d wanted to go to the Summer Olympics. When he said this he laughed, snorting as he breathed in. He also liked big-game hunting. Whenever we met, Peter was always wearing a light-blue bow tie.
At our first meeting he had asked what branche my father was in. He said “branche,” not “line of business,” as if he were French. I bet he speaks fluent French, I thought. I looked out of the window, saw a woman in a fur coat and said that my father owned a coypu farm. I told him I’d gone to school in a village in Cumbria and that I’d had to help out on the farm in the afternoons, cleaning cages and skinning the coypu.
“Furs have to come from somewhere,” said Peter.
It would only have taken him a few seconds to Google me and he would have seen where I actually went to school, and that a coypu farmer could not have paid the school fees. However, I trusted that I wasn’t interesting enough to Peter for him to think of doing that.
One day, at the start of term, we met at Fitzbillies café. I drank water; Peter ate a cinnamon roll. The syrup ran down his chin and dripped onto his collar.
“I’d like to talk about the university clubs, Charlotte. I mean, we don’t have things like this in China.”
I could feel myself going red. “I don’t know anything about that.”
I stared at the syrup on his collar. He chewed quickly, dabbing at his upper lip with his napkin.
“Oh, I know quite a lot. In any case, there’s only one name you need to know, Charlotte: the Pitt Club.”
“Oh yes?”
“I’m becoming a member soon.”
I reckoned he was lying; I couldn’t see the Pitt Club admitting a guy from China.
“How do you become a member?” I asked.
He gave a tight smile.
“You know, Charlotte, it’s the kind of club where you don’t ask how to become a member,” he said. “I mean, you’re either one of them or you’re not.”
“And you’re one of them?”
“It doesn’t admit women, Charlotte.”
“What a pity.”
Fury rose up inside me. I think he noticed the change in my voice.
“I mean …”
“Do you know what they do in those clubs?”
“Well, they party, drink, have a good time, things like that.”
Things like that. I thought about it every single day. Why me? That was the question I kept coming back to. Why me? But the question that kept me awake at night was: Why at all?
“You have no idea,” I said.
“Charlotte, I—”
“Clubs like that are the lowest of the low. Misogynistic, elitist, stupid.”
Peter was still smiling.
“Charlotte, I’m sorry I started talking about this, but I prefer to see for myself before making a judgment.”
“Why are you all so obsessed with this club?”
Peter plucked at his bow tie.
“Why don’t you go to one of their parties first, before you start criticizing it left, right, and center?”
I stood up, almost knocking my chair over, and headed for the door. Halfway there I turned, went back to the table, bent over Peter and said, as quietly as I could just then, “You sad fuck.”
>
Outside in the fresh air, I wondered whether he’d deserved such an outburst. A few steps later I was quite sure that he had.
Hans
A servant had taken my shopping bags up to one of the guest rooms on the first floor. My dinner jacket was hanging on the clothes rail. This day was totally surreal. I turned the tap to cold and took a long shower, letting the water cascade onto my head. Charlotte had said I should come to her as soon as I was ready; she would be waiting for me. I’d stared at my feet and she had laughed.
I dressed and went up to the second floor. Her door was open. Charlotte was lying on her stomach asleep on the bed. She was wearing a high-necked black dress and no shoes and breathing deeply. Her blonde hair fell across her face; the dress was stretched tight across her shoulders. She looked as if her body temperature was always one or two degrees higher than other people’s. Now, in sleep, she looked happy.
For some reason I still haven’t fathomed, women like me. I realized it early on and wondered what it was they saw in me. I didn’t know how to respond. It was strange; it didn’t make sense that boys bullied me but girls liked me. And when the boys noticed it, they bullied me even more.
When I reached puberty a new interest in women awoke in me, one that initially took me by surprise, as it probably does most boys. I liked looking at girls, but even more than that I liked to smell them; they smelled of hay and vanilla ice cream, and something still unfamiliar to me. I could never have summoned the courage to approach a girl or a woman, but fortunately I never had to, and that was possibly the biggest puzzle of all for me.
In my village there were girls everywhere: at school, at the ice-cream parlour, in the hayloft in the new barn behind the football pitch. At boarding school I was surprised I met any women at all, because it wasn’t that easy when you lived only with boys and monks; but I did meet them—when I went for walks in the forest, or on trips to Munich at weekends. One woman I slept with I met buying pretzels at the baker’s.
Another woman, who already had children, sat next to me in a café in Munich one Sunday. Later, after we’d had sex, she smoked a cigarette on her balcony and told me I was the perfect man for an affair: quiet, with coal-black hair. At the time I felt very proud, because I was seventeen years old and she was already an adult; but then she said she could never marry a man like me, and asked me to leave because her husband and children would soon be back from the zoo. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. No woman ever said “I love you.” I slept with women and I liked to breathe in the scent of their hair afterwards. The women were all so different, each one good in her own way. One of them told me she liked me because I was a serious lover.
When I was still very young I had asked my mother how I would know whether or not I loved someone, and she had said that when it happened, I would know.
A few years later a circus came to the village and pitched its tent beside a cornfield. The circus was called Kókoro. When I’d heard about it I’d run to the cornfield and asked if I could feed the big cats if I helped erect the tent. My main interests back then, depending on my mood, were big cats and breasts. Looking back now, I think there’s no better time in life than these last days of childhood.
In one of the cages was a white tiger that had been declawed. I threw a beef shank through the bars, but the tiger ignored it. A few minutes later a girl with dark eyes and pale brown skin emerged from a caravan; she opened the cage door and went in, took the bone, and held it up in front of the tiger’s nose. He ate out of her hands. The girl was perhaps three years older than me; she had small breasts and a flat, hard belly, though I didn’t know that yet. She came out of the cage, took my hand and pushed it down the front of her trousers. I felt hair, and I liked it. She laughed, showing her white teeth, pulled my hand out of her trousers, encircled it with her fingers and didn’t let go till we were deep in the cornfield. Her shirt was too short. On her back, just above her sacrum, were downy sun-blonde hairs I would have liked to touch. As she undressed me I stared at the dried blood on her fingers from the cow bone, too excited to be disgusted by it. She spoke to me in a foreign language. She was like me. Or so I thought, at fourteen years old.
I met her every day for the next two weeks. On the last day I wanted to ask her if she would stay with me; I knew I would lose her if she moved on. For me she was the only woman I could love, besides my mother.
She left without saying goodbye. I didn’t have a chance to ask her. Sometimes I fear she may never have existed at all.
I didn’t know how I should wake Charlotte, because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing; all day I’d had the feeling she was on the verge of shattering to pieces. I said her name but she slept on. I thought about slamming the door, but that seemed rude, and I was afraid one of the servants might see me in her room and misconstrue things. So I took the arch of her foot in my hand. It was very soft. Charlotte woke with a start; she leapt up and lashed out in my direction.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were still sleepy; everything about her was warm. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was just then.
“Charlotte …”
“Do you have another bow tie?” she asked.
I put my hand to my collar and didn’t finish my sentence. She said that my tie was pre-tied and I needed a proper one. She’d be right back, I should hold on.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
A few minutes later she walked through the door, barefoot, and smiled at me. She had a black, untied, ribbed silk bow tie in her hand.
“I’ll tie it for you,” she said.
I sat down on a chair in front of the mirror, which extended from floor to ceiling. She tied the bow with slow movements, and although she tried to look as if she’d done it many times before, I noticed the little vertical line between her brows. I could smell the perfume she had sprayed on her wrists: orange peel and lily of the valley. Her little finger brushed my neck.
“It’s my father’s. He won’t notice,” she said.
We walked down the stairs. A man who could only be her father was standing on the marble floor at the bottom; he had hair like Charlotte’s, just as thick and long but silvery blond, slicked down and combed back, the ends just touching his silk lapel. He kissed his daughter on both cheeks and looked at me. He was as tall as I was and must have been at least sixty, but he had the body of a young man: slender, athletic, full of energy.
“I want to know everything about the new boxing team. Angus Farewell.”
His handshake was dry and firm.
“Hans Stichler,” I said, and realized that I couldn’t tear my eyes from his face. This man made me feel as if I were being received by a king.
The first course was tomato consommé, and with every spoonful I wondered how it was possible that something so colorless could taste so strongly of tomato. We sat at a too-large table in a room with curtains of pink raw silk. Everything looked expensive. The head of an exotic-looking bull hung on the wall. When Angus Farewell noticed me looking at it he said it was a Cape buffalo that he’d shot himself. The rifle, he said, was actually more beautiful than the buffalo, but he’d thought it would be silly to hang a gun on the wall. It was a .700 caliber falling-block rifle made by an Austrian gunsmith. I nodded. You handloaded it with a single bullet, he said. I looked at the buffalo’s curved, projecting horns and wondered why some people felt the need to kill such a creature and hang its head in their living room.
“The gun’s in the corner,” said Farewell, “in case of intruders.”
I looked at the corner.
“Behind the curtain,” said Farewell.
Bread was served by a man in a dinner jacket who didn’t introduce himself. I felt as if I were sitting in a restaurant, and listened as Charlotte chatted with her father. They talked about her PhD, her horse, and the upcoming race against Oxford. A large part of the conversation was about things I didn’t understand, so I concl
uded that it was smarter to keep quiet. Charlotte looked at me and I knew I would have to say something soon, but I didn’t know what, and the longer the two of them went on talking while I sat silently beside them, the more keenly I felt that I was failing whatever test this was.
Angus Farewell reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a mobile phone. “Jesus Christ,” he said, took the call, and left the room.
Charlotte got up and walked around the table. The look in her eyes made me briefly catch my breath. She stood behind me, placed one hand on the back of my neck, leaned forward and spoke quietly in my ear.
“Right, laddie, you just listen to me. I don’t know where Alex dug you up, but you are going to pull yourself together and tell my father something about the bloody boxing team. You’re boring him to death. You won’t get anywhere like this.”
Eyes closed, I breathed in her scent. All this time she had been gentle; now there was a hardness in her voice that surprised me.
Farewell’s leather soles echoed down the corridor. Just before he came back into the room, Charlotte clouted the back of my head.
“Sydney,” said Farewell, as if that explained something. He sighed, replaced his napkin on his thighs and stared at me, frowning.
“You all right there, my friend?” he asked.
Charlotte looked at me and gave a little scream. I glanced down and saw the blood that was dripping from my nose into the béarnaise sauce, streaking it red. The wound in my nose must have opened up again when Charlotte hit me on the head.
“It’s from sparring. Please, forgive me.” I had to smile; it was too stupid.
Farewell slapped the table. He looked delighted. Laughter lines creased his face.
“Welterweight, eh, Hans? May I call you Hans?”
“Yes. Welterweight.” I looked down at the plate. “For now.”
Charlotte laughed. I was a little puzzled: I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tried to be funny.