Towards the end of my first week, on the Saturday, I asked for fried sweet cabbage with my steak (onion rings were off). A boxing match was on TV that night. Two heavyweights. Fff. Fff, fff. Blat. Fff. Blat, blat. BLAT. Over the din of people cheering I heard the legs of the chair opposite me scrape on the floor.
‘Mind if I sit down?’
I looked up slowly from my plate. It was a man in a donkey jacket, maybe fifty-five years old. His bald head had the high shine of a dance-floor. What was left of his hair floated above it like dry ice.
‘You live in the hotel, don’t you.’
I put down my knife and fork and stared at him.
‘The Kosminsky,’ he said. ‘Eighth floor.’
I was still staring at him. ‘You following me or something?’
‘Following you?’ He paused. ‘No. I live across the hall. Room eight-thirteen.’
‘I haven’t noticed you.’
He laughed. Or coughed. I couldn’t tell which.
‘The name’s Gregory,’ he said.
I stared at him for a moment longer, then reached across the table with my hand.
‘Martin,’ I said. ‘Martin Blom.’
He took my hand in his and gripped it. His palms were dry, almost shiny, and one of his fingers was missing.
‘You probably noticed the finger,’ Gregory said. ‘I lost it working on the trawlers.’
He told me how. Twenty years ago now, maybe more. Up in the Arctic, fishing for cod. His hand got caught in a rope as it whipped around a winch. The finger was too chewed up to sew back on. Funny thing was, he didn’t remember feeling any pain. In fact, he’d never been calmer in his life. He just stood there, asked someone for a cigarette. Smoked it while they tied the tourniquet. After that they called him Smoke. People still called him Smoke today. Most of them didn’t know the reason, though.
‘What about you?’ Gregory said. ‘You always been blind?’
I hadn’t talked to anyone for days – not across a table, anyway, not like this. There was a kind of warmth about it that made whoever you were talking to irrelevant. It occurred to me that I was about to tell my story for the first time. It was a strange feeling, releasing it.
‘It happened in February,’ I said. ‘I was shot by someone. In the head.’
‘Shot in the head? Jesus Christ!’
‘I was coming home from work. Normal day. Stopped at a supermarket to pick up some groceries. Walked back to my car. All of a sudden – BAM!’ I brought my hand down on the table. It caught the lip of a spoon and sent it somersaulting over Gregory’s shoulder. He didn’t even notice.
‘Jesus Christ –’ he said again.
‘Yeah, well. That’s how it happened.’ I decided not to mention the tomatoes; I didn’t think he’d understand. Instead, I found myself making a confession. ‘Sometimes it’s scary. Not the blindness so much. More the memory. You know, of being shot. So sudden like that. Out of nowhere …’ I paused. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t much care for car-parks any more.’
‘I bet you don’t. Did they find out who did it?’
I shook my head. ‘Nobody saw anything. Even I didn’t see anything.’
It was such a relief to tell the story out loud, just those few disjointed sentences, to a complete stranger, that I did something I never normally do: I ordered dessert – a slice of apple strudel, with cream.
‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s still out there somewhere …’
Later, as I walked the red-light streets of the 14th district, I thought of how we’d traded, Gregory and I: his finger for a piece of my skull. That was what people did. They found something they had in common – an injury was always good; so was a disaster – then they traded. I suddenly saw my dream in a new light, not as fear but nostalgia. Returning to myself as I used to be, if only for a few moments. Revisiting a version of myself that no longer existed. The complete me.
Someone was pulling on my sleeve.
‘Hey, blind man. I’m fucking beautiful and you can have me for twenty-five.’
I looked at her. ‘You’re not beautiful.’
The whore let go of me. ‘What the fuck do you care?’
My life was simple, some might say monotonous. Most days I got up at four-thirty in the afternoon. Outside, dusk would be coming down. If I opened my window I could watch the street-lights fizz, then flicker on. People spilled from their office buildings, out into the orange gloom, all moving at the same speed, but in different directions, like cells under a microscope. At six o’clock I left my room. I walked along the west bank of the river, passing the rowing club, closed for the winter, and the outdoor swimming-pool, its blue floor strewn with leaves. Or else I followed the path that led through the park and round the artificial lake. Or sometimes I visited the zoo. In the street behind the hotel there was a café which was famous for the rudeness of its waiters. It was here that I ate my breakfast. They soon became accustomed to me, sitting at a table in the corner with my glass of café au lait and my slightly stale brioche. After breakfast I returned to the hotel. If it was Victor’s shift, I’d stop for a chat. He had asked me about myself one night when I came in. I’d told him the story. Naturally, he wanted to know what it was like to be shot, right down to the last detail. I didn’t mind his ghoulish enthusiasm. At least it was honest. If Arnold was on reception, however – morbid, chain-smoking Arnold – I’d walk straight past the desk; Arnold wasn’t a man you could talk to easily. Back in my room I switched the TV on and pulled up a chair. For the next two hours I watched whatever they were showing: soap-operas, news programmes, dramas – anything. I’d been astonished when I realised I could actually watch TV. Since I’d established that my vision was linked to darkness, and since the light emitted by a TV screen is so intense, I’d automatically assumed that watching it would be impossible. But it was one of those vagaries of my condition – another mystery or miracle – that I could see the picture as clearly as I could see Victor’s fingernails or Gregory’s bald head.
Lunch at Leon’s was the high point of my day. I always looked forward to my steak and onions, the bustle and clatter of the kitchen, the conversations I could listen to. I liked the plastic hoop ear-rings the cashier wore; I liked the way the cook’s face hung in the steam above some boiling pot or pan. And it was Leon’s that had provided me with my first real acquaintance. Gregory worked nights as a security guard at a bank, and he often dropped in halfway through his shift for a cup of coffee and a pastry. During my second week in the city, I ran into him again.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’ Gregory sat down at my table, without asking this time, and slumped over the Formica.
I could see that, before too long, I’d have to find somewhere else to eat. We were both lonely men, Gregory and I; the difference was, he hadn’t chosen it. Still, by hearing me out the other night, he’d done me a favour (even if he wasn’t aware of it), and that made me generous.
‘Smoke,’ I said, ‘how’s things?’
A grin split his face wide open. All you had to do was use his stupid name and he’d be happy.
For a while we talked generally, about the present – his job, his daughter’s wedding, sport – then he narrowed it down, went back in time. He began to tell me about the factory he worked in for twenty years. He used to pack fish. This didn’t surprise me. The first time I met him I thought I could smell fish, and now I realised that I hadn’t been mistaken. It was as if the smell of cod had been preserved at some deep level of his skin, layers down, the way a tree’s rings can record a bolt of lightning or a flood.
‘Feel this,’ Gregory said. ‘Feel my hand.’
I reached out and felt it. I remembered it from the week before. It was smooth and shiny, like touching fibre glass. I told him so.
‘That’s twenty years of packing fish, that is.’
His hands were ruined. Where I had lines, he had cracks. And the cracks, he told me, often opened up and bled. There was nothing he could do about it. It was the price you pai
d, working in those factories. Before that, he’d sailed on trawlers, up into Arctic waters. ‘But I already told you that …’
I nodded patiently. I was thinking about getting away, back to my room. I was thinking about turning on the TV. Maybe I’d drink a schnapps or two. Then, later, a walk through the red-light streets, peep-show neon silvering the puddles …
‘You’re a good fellow, Blom,’ he said, and he stared at me, all watery-eyed and serious.
At first I wasn’t sure why he had that look on his face. Then I realised what it was, and almost choked on my steak. The poor fool felt sorry for me!
‘You’re new to the city,’ he said, ‘aren’t you.’
‘I got here about a week ago.’
‘You know anyone?’
‘Only you.’ I grinned. ‘Sounds like a song, doesn’t it.’
‘You know, you should get out,’ he said, ‘meet some people.’ His voice brightened suddenly. His daughter’s wedding, he’d mentioned it already, it was in a few days’ time. Maybe I should come along.
‘That’s very kind of you, Gregory, but –’
‘Loots is coming.’
‘Who?’
‘Albert Loots. He’s a friend of mine.’ Gregory leaned forwards. ‘He used to work in a circus. Works in a factory now. Cakes and biscuits.’ Gregory sighed, but it was a sigh of deep satisfaction. He liked it when lives described a curve, as both ours did. He liked to have some kind of proof that fortune’s wheel had turned. ‘I see him on his bicycle sometimes. Usually it’s when I’m going home, six or seven in the morning –’ Gregory yawned. ‘Wish I could hit the hay. Ah well, no rest for the wicked.’ He heaved himself to his feet, looked down at me. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you think you’ll come?’
‘I’ll try.’
I watched him leave with dread rising in me like a river whose history it is to burst its banks. Gregory’s daughter’s wedding. It was bound to be one of those interminable suburban functions. There’d be a band – some bunch of tone-deaf alcoholics playing folk tunes. There’d be dancing, which I’d always thought of as a kind of illness, like Parkinson’s disease, or epilepsy (someone call an ambulance, for Christ’s sake). There’d be displays of sentiment and bonhomie on every side. I was going to have to get out of it – but how? I walked through the 14th district for most of that night, trying to think up excuses.
Towards dawn I was on my way back to the Kosminsky when I saw a man riding a bicycle down the middle of a wide, deserted street. It was still very early, the trees loud with birds, light slowly beginning to ease into the sky. Because he was just about the only thing moving, I kept my eyes on him. He was some distance away, though; I couldn’t see his face.
As I watched, the man swung himself up into the air. Suddenly he was upside-down, one hand on the handlebars, the other on the saddle. It was so deft, so effortless, that he appeared weightless, immune to the laws of gravity. And the bicycle was still travelling down the middle of the street; if you’d traced its progress with a piece of chalk, if you’d drawn a line on the tarmac, I doubt there would have been even a kink in it. The man wore tight-fitting, pale-yellow trousers and a glittering blue jersey with stars on it. It seemed to me that he was juggling what looked like oranges with his feet. Then, just before he disappeared from view, he dropped back down into the saddle, his feet synchronising with the pedals, the oranges vanishing, one by one, into his pockets. I found myself applauding.
‘What happened?’ asked a passer-by.
‘It’s over now,’ I said. ‘You missed it.’
As I prepared for bed I remembered something Gregory had told me. Used to be in a circus. Sometimes I see him on his bicycle. Surely it had to be the same man. That friend of his, the one he’d invited to his daughter’s wedding. What was his name? Teats? Groot? Something like that. I felt my anxieties lift, my excuses fall away. I’d spent half the night in torment – and now? I realised I was actually looking forward to the event. All it had taken was a man on a bicycle and half a dozen oranges. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. I watched my mouth open wide, I saw my teeth. I was laughing.
That same week I noticed a disturbing phenomenon. It was after returning from Leon’s one night. I pressed the call button outside the lift. Nothing happened. I must have waited five or ten minutes, first pressing the button, then leaning on it, but the lift never came. In the end I took the stairs.
I’d just reached the second floor when I saw something that brought me to a sudden standstill. Two people, having sex. They were lying on the carpet, half in and half out of the lift. One of the woman’s arms trailed across the corridor, as if she was practising her backstroke, as if the whole thing was taking place in water and she was trying to swim away from it. Every now and then, the lift doors closed on her – then opened again. There were red marks where the stainless steel had bitten into her hips. It was like seeing one form of life caught in the jaws of another. This didn’t seem to detract from her pleasure, though; in fact, it could well have been contributing. I smiled, murmured an apology and, stepping carefully over her outstretched arm, continued up the next flight of stairs. They didn’t seem to notice me at all.
I might not have thought any more about it – after all, they were probably just business people: a company director and his secretary – but then, two days later, I saw another couple. They were sideways-on to me, at the far end of the corridor. The woman lay on her back, though her shoulders were taking most of the weight. She was folded almost double, her heels tucked into the old-fashioned radiator that stood under the window. Blue light flashed on the stretched backs of her thighs as a tram rumbled past outside. The man, dark-haired and muscular, half-stood, half-sat above her, knees slightly bent. As he pushed downwards, into her, he happened to glance round. A gold medallion swung across his chest, one stroke of a pendulum, and came to rest. Did he see me standing there in the shadows by the stairs? And, if so, was he reassured by my dark glasses and my white stick?
That was Saturday. As chance would have it, during the next week, the lift was either in use or out of order (for reasons I was now beginning to understand); most nights I was forced to climb the eight floors to my room. On Monday I saw the woman I’d last seen trapped in the lift doors. This time she was bent over the small table that had the hotel telephone on it. She was naked and a man was standing behind her, wearing a tuxedo and a pair of black socks. I didn’t recognise him. The telephone was ringing underneath the woman. ‘Don’t you think someone ought to answer that?’ I said. They looked at me, but didn’t say anything. On Wednesday night, as I reached the second floor, I saw three girls in black leather sitting on the sofa. They were smoking. One of them wore a long metal ring that extended beyond her middle finger like a second, sharper nail. Halfway along the corridor I could see a short fat man on his hands and knees. He wore a black T-shirt, a black PVC mini-skirt and black high-heels. His legs were shaved. One of the girls stretched her thigh-length boot out as he crawled across the carpet towards her. He bent down and began to suck the toe. ‘You got a problem?’ one of the girls said suddenly (it was the girl with the ring). ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’ I hurried on up the stairs. On Thursday I decided not to stop on the second floor, no matter what I saw, but as it turned out it was a quiet night. There was a girl in white-lace underwear standing in the doorway of a room. A man in a suit was talking to her. He had his hands in his pockets. The two of them were deep in some private negotiation, though they fell silent as soon as they noticed me. The girl didn’t have the kind of face you’d associate with somebody who was almost naked; it was attentive, businesslike, as if she was in an office, or a bank. The man was probably a pimp, I thought, as I began to climb towards the third floor. At that moment he looked at me, over his shoulder. His face was entirely without expression.
That weekend I met Gregory in Leon’s. I leaned over the table in a conspiratorial manner that I knew he liked and asked him if he had noticed anything strange about the second floor.
‘You mean, at the Kosminsky?’
I nodded.
‘No.’
‘You haven’t noticed anything at all?’
‘Like what?’
I told him to go and have a look for himself. The second floor, I said. From midnight onwards.
That morning, close to dawn, I saw eight people doing it. They were standing in a circle at the top of the stairs, four women and four men. All the women had dildos strapped around their hips. Each person was being fucked and fucking at the same time (somehow it reminded me of a doughnut). You could charge for this, I was thinking. But, at the same time, I was wearied by it and I wished there was another way of getting to my room. I decided to have a word with the management. I wasn’t going to complain, exactly. I’d just mention it. Discreetly.
I found Arnold on duty the next evening and, since he was the more senior of the two receptionists, I thought it was him I should speak to. It was raining outside; water tipped through the rips in the canopy, splashed on to the pavement below. I took him aside and told him of the recent goings-on.
‘Goings-on?’
I leaned closer. ‘On the second floor.’
Arnold lit a cigarette with a snap of his lighter.
‘All right, I’ll be blunt,’ I said. ‘People fucking.’
Arnold’s eyebrows dipped towards the bridge of his nose. Just for a moment they resembled the logo of our national airline.
The Insult Page 8