by Will Wiles
I felt a sudden and foolish urge to declare my presence from the balcony, state that I had arrived, and that I would be staying.
Of course, Oskar had left a careful list of instructions on the dining table. Oskar did not do chaos. He did not do disorganisation. He did not do disorder. At university, we had a bad joke about him:
Q: Where does Oskar go on holiday?
A: The Coaster del Sol.
Ha, ha. This was a direct reference to Oskar’s habit – treated with bafflement, ridicule and mild annoyance by the other undergraduates – of swooping down with a coaster whenever it looked as though a drink served by him in his rooms might come in contact with a surface. The crowning insanity of this was that the surfaces came with the room, were supplied by the college, and were already heavily pitted and scarred by decades of use by less conscientious members of the intellectual cream of the nation’s youth. He even did it with beer mats in pubs.
The flat was quiet, and the cats – both a mixture of black and white – were grooming themselves on the sofa. I needed noise and stimulation before sitting down to read Oskar’s instructions, so I returned to the study, propped the door open and tried to pick a CD.
There was no danger of being denied choice: the CDs must have numbered in four figures. As might be expected, the vast majority were yellow- and red-spined classical. Not being very familiar with classical music – its codes and sigils, the K341s and scherzos were a strange and threatening language to me – I hunted for the familiar, the recent. After a few moments I found, in a discreet and embarrassed corner of a shelf, Oskar’s half-dozen popular discs: David Bowie, Simon and Garfunkel, Queen, the Kinks, and a ‘Best of’ the Velvet Underground, which I plucked and slotted into the hi-fi. ‘Sunday Morning’ in Lou Reed’s wistful tones filled the strange flat in the distant city. I calmed.
Four A4 pages, closely filled with Oskar’s script, anchored by a bottle of red wine. I read:
My old friend,
Again, thank you for your help in what is sadly such a difficult time for me. The flat is not large and what I need from you not great, it is mainly a business of knowing that there is a trusted soul in situ and that I need fear no break-ins or fire. As I sincerely hope you are aware, I would gladly repay this favour for you at any time.
First, let me address the issue of my friends the cats. They are called Shossy and Stravvy. They are fond of their activities and often very fast and busy, but they are good souls and happy to be picked up and very happy to be stroked. Please do this, it is good for everyone I think! But they must be fed and their hygiene must be attended. I have left tins of their favourite food, and their bowls, and the bag with their litter, and their tray, in the little room by the kitchen, with the clothes washing machine. They need half a tin each in the morning and the same in the evening, with a sprinkling of their biscuits, which are also in the cupboard with the food. Please remove their doings every day; there is a scoop for this not very nice job! Every week, change the litter.
When you go to bed, please shut them out of the front door, and in the mornings, you will find them back and hungry, ready for their breakfast! They are allowed on the bed for their sleep BUT NOT THE SOFA or the chairs in the living room.
Shit. I looked across at the sofa. The cats were still happily sprawled there, enjoying their illicit activity. Not a good start. Well, they were meant to be ‘fond of their activities’. I broke off reading to banish them from the forbidden zone, watched them saunter sulkily back into the bedroom, then returned to the note.
Please make sure that the windows and the front door are securely locked if you leave the flat and when you go to bed. I have written down some numbers of plumbers and other emergency people:...
I started to skim. Emergency numbers, location of spare keys, the nearest pharmacies, supermarkets and so on. A few details about the city.
While you’re here, do make an effort to see something at the Philharmonic. They are very good, and I do not say that simply because of my connection with them! Their summer season has now begun and I would love to think that although I cannot be there to enjoy it myself, it might give you some pleasure.
Oh, and finally what is perhaps the most important thing since the cats are able to take care of themselves and will tell you if they are in need of something:
PLEASE, YOU MUST TAKE CARE OF THE WOODEN FLOORS. They are French oak and cost me a great deal when I replaced the old floor, and they must be treated like the finest piece of furniture in the flat, apart from the piano of course.
DO NOT put any drinks on them without a coaster.
ALWAYS wipe your feet before entering the flat, and take off your shoes when inside.
If anything should spill, you MUST wipe it up AT ONCE!!! so that it does not stain the wood. Be VERY CAREFUL. But if there is an accident (!), then there is a book on the architecture shelf that might help you. CALL ME if something happens.
The cleaner calls twice a week (you do not have to pay, it is a service of the building, so do not worry).
I do not know how long I will be in Los Angeles, no one will tell me, and perhaps they do not know. But I think I will be safe to return after about three weeks, and with any luck for me, less than that. I will telephone you at times and let you know how things are going.
And again my thanks. The wine is for you. I hope to see you soon.
Your old friend,
OSKAR
I stared at the note for a brief time after reading through it, to see if any deeper meaning became obvious. Was a note of this length, in this sort of detail, normal? Normal for Oskar, I supposed. How he must hate to leave his flat like this. ‘A trusted soul’ he had written. Really? Not so trusted that I could escape being micromanaged by notes, it seemed. So clean, so ordered. I thought of the pencil shavings in the wastepaper basket. Oskar’s neat-freakery only made minuscule ‘lapses’ like that more noticeable. He had the assistance of a cleaner, of course. But how thorough was the cleaner? London was full of Eastern European women working as domestic cleaners, but I had no idea if they did a good job. Besides, did we get their ‘A-team’ or their ‘B-team’? Did the best and the brightest cleaners head west? Or only the ones who could not cut the duster in their own countries?
The bookshelves that covered one wall of the room drew my eye. Bookshelves are a devil to keep clean – dust gathers on top of the books with surprising rapidity, and it is difficult and tiresome to thoroughly clean those areas. I strolled over to get a closer look. I also wanted to find a guidebook that would help me navigate this city, something better than the inadequate volume I had brought with me. I doubted I would find one, because I had nothing similar about London back at my flat. But perhaps.
Like the rest of the flat, Oskar’s books were beautiful and carefully arranged. They were organised first by category, and then by size. At least four languages were present, with German and French accompanying English and Oskar’s mother tongue. There was a large number of paving-slab-sized glossy, expensive books of art and photography and ‘design classics’. The art emphasised the ‘modern’ and the difficult -ists, constructivists, vorticists, futurists; Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin; and a blast of warmth and light from volumes on Warhol and Lichtenstein, the sort of art that did not make me so uncomfortable. There was architecture, of course, again characteristically modern: Le Corbusier and Mies, Richard Neutra and Herzog & de Meuron. The Neutra, like the Lichtenstein, suggested a Californian hand here. Did Oskar’s wife have any input when it came to the content of the bookshelves? I doubted it. The mixing of the bookshelves in a relationship is a gesture of vast, almost foolhardy, mutual trust, and Oskar wasn’t able to live on the same continent as his wife, let alone jumble up the contents of his library with hers. Just thinking of the idea made me picture him wincing. But there did not seem to be even a shelf for her – none of the books I imagined she’d read, auction catalogues and law journals, blockbusters for those interminable flights across the world, West-Coast self-help, yard after yard of
management ‘bibles’ by ‘gurus’ – business secrets, the main habits of monied sociopaths, the utterings of successful salesmen and speculators. But not an inch of them was to be seen. Her mind had not established the tiniest beach-head in Oskar’s mental world. Who cheesed her move? The rest of the bookshelf was filled with the typical and the expected. Shelf after shelf of the books I associated with Oskar. There were a variety of novels and histories, broadly twentieth-century classics: Koestler, Camus, Salinger, Solzhenitsyn. History, cultural history, books about World War II and the Nazis and the Soviet Union, Schindler’s Ark, modern politics with an emphasis on America, Russia and Germany, stacks of books about music, biographies of composers and musicians. Not a hint of dust, anywhere, so another ‘win’ for Oskar there. But already it was settling all around me.
One book caught my attention – a big book about Oskar’s orchestra, the Philharmonic, in German. It seemed to be a history written in celebration of a very recent anniversary – 150 years of something. I thumbed it open, planning on looking up Oskar’s name in the index, and found that a leaflet was slipped into it – a programme for the present concert season. Oskar’s photograph smiled out from the page. I grinned at the vanity of it – bookmarking the page with his own photo on it. He was standing beside another man, taller than Oskar, with receding ultra-pale hair revealing a bullet-shaped head. They were wearing the highly formal evening wear that infests classical music, and Oskar’s companion was carrying a violin. It was a good photo – a warm smile from Oskar, a pleasure enhanced by its relative rarity. Oskar applied the same rules to interior design and facial expressions: less is more. A smile was a superfluous decorative extravagance; a grin was rococo excess.
There was something written on the concert programme, in Oskar’s hand:
Maybe Useful?
‘Maybe useful’? Why would he write that on a programme for his own orchestra? No one would know the schedule of performances better than he. Or was the note, and the programme, meant for me? If the programme was intended for me, then tucking it into a book like this was an unusual move – especially this book, this page. Unless he knew I would look in this book – but that was unlikely. Or maybe he thought that looking in this book meant that I was interested in the orchestra and therefore might attend a concert? The photograph of Oskar smiled at me. That smile now seemed teasing. Perhaps the leaflet had been meant for someone else (the wife?), or Oskar was in the habit of leaving notes to himself.
Taking out the programme, I closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Odd, odd. Inside, three performances were marked, their dates underlined, with an asterisk next to them in the margin. The season had started three weeks ago, I saw, but the highlighted concerts were all in the next two weeks, as if they were intended for me, suggestions of performances I might enjoy while I was in town, or ones that Oskar particularly wanted me to hear, for some musical reason that was beyond me. The soonest marked concert was two days away.
In a sudden thrill, the entire oddness of the situation, my situation, struck home; Oskar’s home. Here, his flat, was the aggregation of his entire life; his collected works. And the collected works of Oskar that surrounded me not only displayed the mainstream of his personality, his ordered, taxonomic brain; they also displayed the interstices in that plane of self, the gaps, the discarded bus tickets, the quirks and wrinkles.
Flush with this weird sense of omniscience, I felt a growing need for domesticity, for a small obeisance to the household gods. I wanted to make myself a cup of coffee in order to test the kitchen. Also, I didn’t know what time the cats had last been fed. Oskar probably fed them before he left this morning – he had certainly let them back into the flat – but that may have been quite early. They might by now be hungry, and I thought that feeding them would give me a bit of good PR. Aha, they would think, this is a man who knows how to use the tin opener.
But coffee first. The person in this relationship needed sustenance before the animals. Besides, a quick poke through the cupboards would also establish if there was anything tasty-looking for supper, and there was the horrible possibility that Oskar only stocked coffee beans that needed to be ground and percolated and all that tedious rubbish. It was the sort of thing he was capable of, and there was a coffee-maker-percolator thing on the work surface, its gleaming chrome winking impossibility at me. Those twisty detachable wrench-handle-cup parts pointed accusingly.
Thinking along the lines of the ergonomics of the kitchen, I tried the cupboard immediately above the treacherous mercury-shine gadget. The payload – a waft of dried beans and leaves, pressure-packed, freeze-dried, connoisseur-approved, corporation-imported caffeine for a dozen delivery methods – was hit instantly, but also released with that relieving aroma was a slip of paper that, sucked out of the cupboard by the air-pressure difference created when I opened the door, flipped, looped and swayed down to the worktop.
It read, again in Oskar’s cramped black hand:
Please help yourself to all tea and coffee, but if it should run out please replace.
I stared at the note, just the tiniest strip cut from a pad, for a little while. It was thoughtful. It also felt unnecessary, perhaps; it was pedantic. Did he fear I would strip the flat of the materials for making hot drinks, leaving him thirsty and bereft on his return? Why did he feel another note was needed? The concert programme was still on that table, next to Oskar’s instructions, which had seemed to me to be very comprehensive. But then, this was his flat, he above all had very specific ways of going about the business of existing. The sense of Oskar’s very recent departure from the flat was a static charge in the air. Here was a man with very clear views on what should happen in his home. He had always been particular.
Perhaps it was appropriate that a composer should make notes. At university, Oskar had littered the staircase we shared with slips of paper, instructions, proscriptions, statements of intent, reminders, invitations and rebukes. In the first week of the first term, a little note appeared on the back of the door of the shared toilet: Please use the air freshener. O. On top of the cistern was a brand-new bottle of air freshener: pine. None of the other toilets had air freshener, but this was the one that Oskar used. He had bought it himself. As it was pinned to the back of the door, I was able to inspect this note at my leisure on scores of occasions. The O was hypnotic – a perfect circle, with no obvious beginning or end.
That was just the start of the notes. The emphasis was generally on the NOT. Please do NOT make so much noise after 1 a.m. Please do NOT leave dirty plates in the sink. On our staircase, eight people shared a kitchen. It was the scene and subject of endless disputes. Oskar was far from the only resident with a retinue of grievances and bugbears, and he was inevitably the most courteous in settling them. But his clipped, frosty demeanour, the formality of the notes and the pathological neatness of his room put people on the defensive. The others engaged in volcanic screaming matches that were forgotten within hours. They screamed shithead and bitch at each other and went to the pub together that evening. Oskar never lost his temper, never blew up. He was regularly angry, but his anger was as controlled and modulated and systematic as the music he would later write. Similarly, he never erupted into riotous geniality or helpless laughter. I only ever saw him drunk – properly drunk, that is, different-person drunk – on three occasions.
Q: What does Oskar drink?
A: Neat vodka.
Neat. Ha ha. He liked neat vodka at less than zero degrees centigrade – its high alcohol content means that it does not freeze. He bought a bottle, the best the off-licence had to offer, for himself and guests, and had no other place to store it than the freezer compartment of the communal fridge. This was a big purchase for a student, and the bottle monopolised the minuscule compartment, reduced to a letterbox by a thick sleeve of permafrost. The girlfriend of one of our neighbours failed to appreciate that vodka has to be stored at below-zero temperatures, and transferred the bottle to the main fridge when trying to find a berth
for half a tub of chocolate ice cream.
Moved from its small and little-used nook and placed in the view of half a dozen thirsty, thirsty students, the bottle fared as you might expect. Most of it disappeared within three nights. Oskar discovered this on the fourth, when he had company. He took this badly, and having established the owner of the ice cream (‘Not even someone on this staircase!’) restored the vodka to its rightful place – with a note attached, saying Please do NOT put this out of the freezer.
This dispute somehow sparked off an impishness in the others. It became their mission to remove the bottle, drink some of its contents, and leave the depleted vessel in an unusual place. At this point, Oskar and I became friends: he recruited me to help look for the bottle. I was a nonentity to the others – not unpopular, just uninteresting, only there to make up the numbers at parties. My peripheral status made me an asset to Oskar: he knew I was not among the conspirators, and enlisted me to help search for the vodka.
So we searched together. The first time it turned up in the toilet cistern. The second time it was eventually discovered tied to a light fitting in the hallway. The third time we couldn’t find it for weeks. We had given it up for lost when Oskar found it. Somehow it had been duct-taped to the underside of his desk. The tiresome repetition of the theft did not enrage Oskar – if anything, he seemed to become calmer every time it happened. A few days after the bottle was returned to the fridge for the fourth time, Oskar knocked on my door and calmly informed me that it had disappeared again. Usually on these occasions he looked grim and disappointed – I often felt that he thought he could actually change the attitude of our peers with his little notes and chilly equanimity, an idea that was patently ridiculous, as I regularly told him – but this day he bore a small smile. I asked him if he wanted help recovering it.