‘He’s always late,’ he explained to Claudia as if they were old friends.
‘Sorry.’
‘No – I’m early. Really,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure how to get here so I gave myself plenty of time. It’s nice and cool in here anyway.’
‘Cool? You could store meat in here, no problem,’ Jochen said, chuckling to himself.
‘As long as you’re not bored. I’ll take the pictures and then …’
‘No, no,’ Claudia said. ‘You go ahead. Take your time. It looks interesting. Jochen was telling me all about it.’
I said, ‘Well, why don’t we get to work and I’ll let you know when I’m done?’
‘Okay, I’ll see you later,’ she said and wandered into the main exhibition area.
Jochen shook his head. ‘Cheap date, eh?’
I didn’t reply. I had never liked Jochen and that wasn’t about to change.
‘Now, you’ll need to take pictures of him over there.’ He pointed to a cluster of people in the centre of the hall. I couldn’t make out the person he was referring to. ‘And the bearded guy. Alessandro Strada and Ettore Mistretta – they’re the artists.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘That bunch over there? They’re teachers. I’ve talked to some of them. Dull as hell, but they might be useful in case no one else has anything to say.’
I hadn’t reckoned on all the children, the cacophony of sound, the movement. Claudia was sitting at a giant grand piano with keys the size of paperbacks. Its legs were covered in dense padding. A boy sitting beside her bashed out random notes, but no one seemed to mind the clamour.
Claudia was wearing a pale blue summer dress, in a paisley print. She’d scraped her hair back into a chignon so her highlights were almost invisible. As the boy hammered out the clanging notes, she pressed the pedals with her sandaled feet. It seemed, had she turned to face me, she would surely be the most beautiful woman in the world. But I knew it was only Claudia with whom I had once shared a drunken, pitiful night. Claudia, who claimed the horrific Sylvie as a good friend. I didn’t know why she was here, sitting at the piano with a strange child, why I had invited her, why she had wanted to come.
Saucer-sized holes had been drilled into a section of wall. Visitors pressed their faces against the perimeter of each circle to observe or interact with the art: a feather duster tickle, a spray of water, a jelly mould that embraced the face, a Brothers Grimm narrative. Children wrestled with or lay upon outsized toy animals. A girl appeared to have fallen asleep on top of a six-foot crocodile; a string of saliva dangled out of her open mouth. Ropes unfurled from the ceiling, which the children tugged for effect, releasing bursts of confetti, a rainbow of lights, the shrill whistle of a steam train. Parents and teachers patiently accompanied the children around the exhibits.
I photographed a girl Jochen was trying to engage. She was far too excited to answer his questions and she skipped across the gallery, eager to join her friends. She collided into a vast, cushioned Mother Hubbard shoe and I frowned. She fell and struggled to recover her orientation. Only then did I realize, although I couldn’t understand why it had taken so long, that all the children were blind or partially sighted. I noticed the hesitant movements now, the caution, the absence of resolute abandon.
A boy tiptoed beneath a hole in the wall, but could not reach it. I moved closer to the source; there was a sound of dripping water. He stretched up, making tiny fists, then unfurled them. He continued this repeatedly until I thought he would begin to wail. I placed my camera on the floor and lifted him so that his face was inside the circle.
‘What’s in there?’ he asked, jerking his head sideways in order to listen.
Apart from the dripping water there was no activity. The space was completely dark. A sensor must have been triggered because the blackness turned to fluorescent yellow, then sapphire and then a shower of water swirled into a luminous pool. An instant oasis.
‘What’s in the water?’ the boy asked. ‘Fairies?’
‘Well … no, not fairies. It’s just water,’ I said.
‘But I can hear fairies,’ he whispered.
I wondered where his parents were. He giggled as if someone else was speaking to him. The pool turned peacock green. And then I could hear something, a faint high-pitched mirth intermingled with the trickling water. There must have been a tape playing at very low volume. The boy made cooing noises as if he were able to see what lay ahead of him. I wondered what he did see, what his senses were telling him, what he imagined instead of the lush green glow, the encircling rings of water.
After dinner Claudia and I took the U-Bahn to Krumme Lanke and walked for fifteen minutes before stopping in front of a modern apartment block. A handful of tall pine trees decorated a parched manicured lawn. As we walked up several carpeted flights of stairs, I tried to recall the interior of the building, to no avail. I had been drunk that night. Apart from the memory of a disappointed Claudia, I could remember little else.
‘This is unusual,’ I said, relieved she hadn’t witnessed the ruin I called home.
‘It is, isn’t it,’ Claudia said. ‘Spanish architect. I remember hearing that once. The balconies are huge – wide enough for tables and chairs. We could sit outside and have a drink, if you like.’
She turned the key in the lock and I wondered how soon we would begin. I dreaded the delay of coffee and small talk. I wanted to feel her soft skin, to be inside her again.
As we moved into the apartment I reached out to her shoulder, but she suddenly called out ‘Mum!’, perhaps from fear, so that I almost jumped.
‘Claudi? Claudi, is that you?’ A woman wearing a floor-length blue and white kimono emerged from the hallway. ‘Oh, Claudi. This is the young man?’ she asked, this time in English.
‘Yes, this is Vincent. Vincent, my mother.’
In my confusion I reached out to shake her hand, but she offered me her cheek. I couldn’t work out what was happening.
‘Vanessa Schlegel,’ she said, in perfect, accented English. ‘Delighted to meet you.’ The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. She had drawn her strawberry blonde hair into a tight ponytail, which shot out at a seventy-five degree angle from the back of her head. She was several inches shorter than her daughter, and slim to the point of being gaunt. Her bare feet slapped against a gleaming wooden floor. Another memory came to me: leaving Claudia that first time I remembered the carpeting in her room, throughout the apartment. I had never been here before.
‘Why don’t you two sit down and I’ll make some tea,’ her mother said, reverting to German. Her voice was gravelly, which might have come from cigarettes or shouting or both. The kimono trailed behind her as she wandered into the kitchen. She didn’t look older than forty-five.
‘I thought we were going to your place?’
‘Well, I think of this as my place, too. I spend a lot of time here,’ Claudia said.
She led me outside to an oval wooden table and cloth-covered dining chairs. I caught my reflection in the glass of the sliding doors, oversized and burly. The walk up the stairs had generated an instant sweat and I wiped my face surreptitiously with the back of my hand. The pine trees on the lawn protected us from the gaze of passers-by on the other side of the road, but I could see the pavement we had used on our way from the station.
Claudia sat with her legs crossed at the ankle and closed her eyes against the breeze. She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I would have told you where we were going, but I thought you wouldn’t come.’
‘Well, I don’t know. I might have come anyway.’
‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ she said resolutely. ‘I have to look after my mother sometimes, so I couldn’t have gone anywhere else. Besides, she wanted to meet you.’
‘She did?’ We barely knew one another and after this would probably never see each other again.
The pine trees bristled in the breeze and I was grateful for the cool air. I went up to the metal railing where a row
of potted plants lined the edge. The apartment was at the top, on the fourth floor, with an overview of the neighbourhood. There were mainly houses here instead of apartment blocks, and green spaces between buildings, a pleasant calm.
‘Here we go, here’s tea and coffee.’ Claudia’s mother came out onto the balcony. ‘You like cheesecake, Vincent? This kind is delicious. Baked – American style.’
I sat down and drank coffee, while Claudia sipped tea. Her mother drank wine. I would have liked a glass myself, but it wasn’t offered.
‘It’s very peaceful here. I like this place,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t know you were in the city.’
‘I like it too, but it’s hardly quiet,’ she said. ‘You can’t hear the traffic?’
I closed my eyes and made out the faint ambition of acceleration, the constant rally of cars in the distance. It didn’t seem significant.
‘You are from where, Vincent?’ Frau Schlegel asked, and I told her. I had to explain about the Sahara and the Gulf of Guinea, the armpit of Africa.
‘I have never been,’ she said. ‘I wanted to go in my twenties, on safari, but it was too expensive. Then Claudi arrived.’ She smiled as if she had no regrets whatsoever.
‘It must be interesting, Nigeria, so close to the equator. The climate. All that variety,’ Claudia said.
‘It’s okay,’ I shrugged. I wouldn’t be drawn.
‘My husband, he wanted to travel to Africa – he was American,’ Frau Schlegel continued. ‘He discovered that his ancestors were in all likelihood from Sierra Leone. He thought so. He always talked about going there one day. Who knows, maybe he went there eventually.’
Claudia looked down at the tiles. She seemed to be concentrating. After a silence, her mother pushed her chair out and stood.
‘Time for bed. I’m sorry Vincent, but it’s early to bed for me. We Schlegels, hey Claudi? It’s annoying, I know.’
‘I’ll help you, Mum.’ Claudia rose and reached for her mother, who did not seem to need any assistance.
We said good night and the two women returned indoors. I could see only the lights of the neighbourhood now. I hadn’t noticed night’s arrival, but it was still early. In town, people would only now be thinking of trickling into the clubs. The noise in the bars would be furious. I wondered whether B or Tunde were out – at the Atlantic or the Boogaloo. I thought I could join them later for a couple of hours if only I knew where they were.
After five minutes, when Claudia had still not appeared, I went indoors in search of the toilet. I crept along an unlit corridor with only the illumination from the sitting room for guidance. There was a strip of light from a room at the end of the hall. The apartment seemed to stretch in different directions. I knocked and opened various doors until I came to a spacious bathroom whose brilliant whiteness was interrupted by a row of burgundy towels folded hotel-neat on a wooden bench. On one wall were four framed black-and-white photographs of women’s shoes: stilettos, ankle boots, mules and sandals. I looked closely and realized the photographs had not been torn out of magazines, but were professional prints.
When I finished I closed the bathroom door behind me and stood for a moment in the dark corridor. I could make out the sound of muted singing, first hushed, then stronger – there was an unrecognizable tune – then falling again to barely a whisper. It seemed to come from the room at the end of the hall.
I returned to the balcony and sat for another ten minutes. When Claudia had still not come back, I went into the sitting room and located a light switch. A long black leather sofa hugged one side of the room, while a huge metallic wall unit covered up most of the wall on the other side. There were few books: several guides to South America, some illustrated hard-backs on shoes and fashion, and Hesse’s Siddhartha. A large-screen television sat in the centre of the unit, and a hi-fi and speakers took up more space. I recognized a young Frau Schlegel in one photograph, a toddler, who must have been Claudia, and a tall, smiling black man in military uniform. I thought of Clariss and her years in the army, how she might have resembled the man smiling before me at one time. There were other photographs – of Claudia at various stages in her life, with her mother, with friends or simply alone – but only one featuring the soldier. I picked up the frame for a closer look. I noticed how beautiful Frau Schlegel had been – she was beautiful still, but she had had the advantage of youth then.
‘There you are,’ I said as Claudia appeared beside me. I hadn’t heard her approach; it was too late to replace the picture frame.
‘There are so many of you here,’ I said.
‘Mum likes to put things out on display,’ she replied. She eased the frame gently out of my hands and returned it to its position in the wall unit.
‘Is that your father?’ I asked.
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
‘Is something wrong?’ She had been away for so long and now she seemed subdued.
‘No, everything’s fine. Mum’s asleep now. She has trouble sleeping, that’s all.’
I reached out to touch her face and moved closer to kiss her. I could see a vague resemblance to her mother in the shape of her almond eyes and the hue of exhaustion beneath them. She didn’t resist and I wondered whether we would spend the night together after all.
‘No, not here. I can’t.’ She shook herself free. She looked round as if someone might walk in at any moment.
‘I thought you said she was asleep.’
‘She is, but I just can’t. Not here. Please.’
‘Well, we can go to your place or mine,’ I tried.
‘I’m sorry, Vincent. I have to stay,’ she continued doggedly. ‘I told you before, remember?’
I nodded, although I didn’t understand what was keeping her. I wanted to spend the night with the Claudia who was frivolous. Who danced and laughed and invited me to her bed even though we had been strangers.
‘Well, perhaps I’ll see you another time,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I had a nice time today. I really enjoyed the exhibition and the meal. I’m glad you came here tonight.’
I nodded but I didn’t see what there was to be so glad about.
15
THE WOMAN WAS screeching. Her husband’s inaudible responses were interrupted by a din of smashing crockery. It wouldn’t have been so disturbing had the Zimmermans not been the quietest, most industrious tenants in the building.
‘What is all that racket?’ Frau Lieser demanded.
‘I don’t know. Sounds like they’re rowing,’ I said. ‘Why are you phoning me?’
‘I’m an old woman!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t put myself in danger. Listen to them – who knows what’s happening? They’re just across from you. Please be a gentleman and ask them to stop.’ She could have phoned them herself, but I didn’t say anything.
I ignored her request in favour of a bath. I was thinking about the enigma of Claudia; how she could lead me on one moment, yet be completely cool the next.
When I emerged from the bathroom, perspiring and dehydrated, the commotion had become worse. Ingo Zimmerman had lost his reserve and was shouting now. I feared they would come to blows if they weren’t interrupted. I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and walked out to the landing.
She was a whore, the husband was a lobotomized pigdog. I could hear them clearly now. I knocked heavily, and immediately the noise ceased. I knocked again, quietly this time, but no one came to the door. My telephone rang, so I ran back to my apartment.
‘You spoke to them?’ Frau Lieser asked.
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I said you’d evict them if they didn’t keep it down.’
‘You told them what?’ she blustered. ‘Who told you to say that?’
‘Frau Lieser, it’s getting late. Some of us need to sleep.’ I hung up.
I woke early the next day to buy beer, bread and milk at the supermarket on Manteuffelstrasse. I’d arranged to take photographs of Arî in his apartment – he often spent his days at the Kurdish centre or at t
he café overlooking the canal – and he wouldn’t appreciate my being late.
It was cooler than the day before and I wondered whether this signalled the end of the heatwave. It still hadn’t rained. I had hoped the high temperatures would continue for a few more weeks despite the complaints and the discomfort. In no time we would be shivering and dressing in layers again, recalling the summer as if it had been a dream.
When I returned Else Zimmerman was locking her apartment door, her back to me. She had on a black jacket and skirt combination, leather ankle boots like an East German waitress.
‘Morning!’ She turned and flashed a smile.
‘Morning,’ I smiled back, searching for bruises. Instead she looked like a woman who had just triumphed at the races. She tucked her briefcase underneath her arm and skipped downstairs as if she hadn’t been shouting herself hoarse all night.
I shook my head and went in to make tea, tearing off a chunk of bread and dunking it without thinking. Then I remembered – that had been Uncle Raymond’s routine, so I cut the loaf into thin slices and made buttered toast instead.
A moment later Arî knocked on the door, asking whether I had forgotten about our appointment.
‘Of course not. How could I forget? Come and help me carry these things.’
He took the lamps while I managed the rest of the equipment and two cans of beer. On the landing he thrust his chin at the Zimmermans’ door. ‘You listen, in the night?’
I nodded, hoping Ingo Zimmerman couldn’t hear on the other side. Arî shook his head.
Arî’s apartment was austere. The surfaces gleamed. There were photographs of friends and relations throughout the room. A rolled-up woven mat was propped up against a wall, and a wooden flute lay on the bedside table. The air was stained thick with tobacco. I set up the lamps and unrolled my screen against a bare wall.
A photograph of Arî and a girl took centre stage on top of the black-and-white television set. On ZDF a woman was discussing the attributes of coffee grown in various parts of the world.
‘Hecher?’ I pointed.
Goodbye Lucille Page 13