by Will Wiles
It was too early for wine. I sipped it with care. It clung to my lips, and to the sides of the glass. Winemakers call this the ‘legs’, and it’s a measure of the alcohol content of the wine – the ‘stickiness’ is caused by the spirit overcoming the liquid’s surface tension.
Surface tension – not a bad description of my fears for the floor, and Oskar’s other perfect planes. His other plane of existence. What was he doing right now? Approaching 3 a.m. in California – he would be still asleep in a hotel room, in that city of hotel rooms and freeways. My mental image of Los Angeles was a sun-baked tangle of asphalt clichés. LA was the nest of his wife, his soon-to-be-ex wife, Laura. I had met her only that once, when she came to dinner, and I had taken an instant dislike to her. She worked for a large American firm of auctioneers, and made extravagant amounts of money overseeing the transfer of fine art masterpieces between members of the superrich. A perfectly legitimate line of business, but my muddy leftism caused me to regard it as somehow discreditable. She drank spirits, Oskar said (neat vodka, perhaps), and I had the strong impression that she did not think very highly of me, that my dislike of her was reciprocated. But my impression of her was fair, of course, and hers of me was a monstrous error based on snobbery.
A discreditable profession, exhibit A: she had described herself as an ‘oil trader’ when we met. Commodities, I assumed, but it was her idea of a joke. Not an icebreaker – it was a ploy to put me off balance and seize the initiative. The art of conversation according to Sun Tzu.
It didn’t help that this exchange took place just inside the front door of my flat, an area that reeked of chemicals from the bleach onslaught I had deployed in the bathroom. The bathroom was next to the front door, as is strangely common in small London flats carved out of Victorian terraces. Welcome to my home – it may smell like a gassed trench, but that’s preferable to it smelling like a latrine. When I consider the placement of that loo, outhouses at the bottom of the garden start looking like a smart move.
Oskar’s toilet did not smell of chemicals or latrines. His bathroom smelled slightly of soap, but mostly it smelled of water. Not the marshy, damp smell that sometimes builds up in bathrooms. Water, the smell of a pristine glacial stream splashing onto rocks, the smell of ice. What is one actually smelling when one smells that smell? Ozone or ions or something. Perhaps if I paid more attention to shampoo adverts I would know.
I ran water over the plate and the paring knife and left them in the sink. Then I drained my glass, hovered over the taps, and turned back to the kitchen table. Again without allowing my actions much thought (another glass? And not yet 1 p.m.?), I took the wine bottle and thumbed the cork out of its neck. With my glass recharged, and my spirits recharged by its contents, I decided to take another look at Oskar’s study as a prelude to maybe doing something constructive, something worthwhile. It drew me because it was so perfect an environment for work.
It was as I had left it, of course; it was almost exactly as Oskar had left it. There was a subtle, near-imperceptible change in the air in here, the smell of paper, of newspaper clippings slowly turning brown (the printing press autumn), the smell of dust. I could hardly see any dust, but it had left its infinitesimal aroma, a ghostly trace in the air. Those motes in their lazy but restless diurnal migration of convection. A dust diaspora, banished from the surfaces. But Oskar had been away, now, for two days – it was settling. The finest sprinkling could be seen on the lid of the baby grand piano. The cleaner would be coming soon to move it along again. Cleaning products often have violent names – Oust, Raid, Purge. One could easily be called Pogrom.
I set my glass down on the blotter on the desk and drew my finger across the top of the piano. It trailed a path in the traces of dust. Next, I attempted to write my name amid the particles, but there were too few to make it out clearly, and I wiped it away. It’s a strange instinct, to want to sign one’s name in misty windows, wet concrete, snow. It is like animals marking their territory, particularly in the case of men inscribing snow. But I do not think it is a possessive, exclusive act: ‘This is mine, keep out.’ When we were a young species, the world must have seemed so unlimited and trackless, and to leave traces of oneself must have been to reach out, wanting to connect with others, strangers who would always remain strangers. To make one’s mark then was an expression of how deeply we longed to see the signs of others.
Idly, I struck a piano key (I do not know which one – it was near the middle) and listened to the note ring in the air. On the far side of the door, the television was still on, near-inaudible, a soft rhythm of speech and jingle, and there was the street, cars (not so many), trams (regular) and feet.
The trams dislodged a thought in my mind. I looked over the shelves of CDs, with their serious, wordy classical spines, and found a small section of works produced by the local Philharmonic. Oskar must have had some role to play in many of these recordings and, sure enough, there were some copies of Variations on Tram Timetables. Lou Reed was still in the CD player; I evicted him and opened the case containing Oskar’s Meisterwerk.
There was a slip of paper inside the case.
I hope you enjoy it! – O.
(There is better to come when Dewey is finished.)
How nice of him, I thought, or at least began to think as the sentiment stopped dead in my mind, like the needle being ripped off the surface of an old vinyl LP. This wasn’t nice, or if it was nice it was nice in a sinister spectrum of nice that I did not have the ability to see. How many of these notes were there? Briefly, the thought of ripping the place apart occurred to me, before I shook it from my head. It was just creepy, not threatening, and no reason to go insane. And if you must go insane it’s best to have a reason. If anything, Oskar was exposing a mental weakness of his own. I should feel superior.
The CD tray of the stereo was still sticking out, pornographically exposed. A tongue, a seedy player. I put in the disc of Variations and closed it, then scrumpled up the little note and dropped it in the bin. Was that a mistake? Perhaps I should have left the note in situ, so that Oskar would not know that I had been listening to his music. But the note had made clear that he welcomed my listening (‘I hope you enjoy it’), so maybe it was good to show interest. Also, if I put the note back now, I would have to smooth it out first, and it would be obvious that I had opened the case, screwed up the note, and then returned it, an obviously lunatic course of events. In any case, maybe the notes were Oskar’s way of keeping track of exactly where I had been in the flat. Faced with control-freakery of that order, what was the polite course – conceal traces, or helpfully leave them where possible?
But it was impossible to second-guess tactics of this kind. If they really were tactics; there was the strong possibility that Oskar’s actions were entirely guileless and friendly, and my reaction was the aberration. ‘Crazy,’ I said to myself softly.
Play. Oskar’s composition whizzed up in the player – his talent began its exhibition. The opening was very simple, a low metronomic note; then, with a higher double-note that sounded almost exactly like a tram bell, the piece suddenly became far more complex. What appeared to be three, or even four, different elements within the tune headed off in various directions, obscuring the composition with apparent chaos, then meeting and intersecting. They were simple, repetitive building blocks, like the beating of metal wheels over points, but at some moments it was difficult to tell how many pianos were involved.
Originally, of course, only the piano in this room had been involved. How did one do that – hear music that is nowhere but inside, and snare it, note by note? Was Oskar a genius? I had no way to tell. Being un-musical, a six-note advertising jingle is a work of alchemical, transcendent skill to me. But Oskar was clearly gifted, set apart from all but a tiny fraction of men and women. An agonising wash of inferiority swept over me – what had I ever done? Here was Oskar’s skill, picked out in Dolby clarity. Thanks to my work, many London residents now knew the phone number of their borough pest co
ntrol officer, and what to do with discarded white goods. I like to think that I had invested my work with a little élan, but it remained the case that if I had not existed, those leaflets would merely have been written by someone else.
I regarded the piano with a mixture of curiosity and awe. It was all bulk, mixed curved and straight lines, reticent surfaces and concealed capabilities, like a stealth bomber. Do not play with the piano, Oskar had said. That presumptuous ‘with’ – of course, you won’t be able to play the piano, the most that can be expected is that you will play with it, like a child, and you shouldn’t even do that.
With as much care as I could muster, I opened the top of the piano and propped it up. There were its workings, complicated but unmysterious, ranks of sleeping soldiers, a harp set on its side. I hit a key and one of the hammers leapt up like toast out of a toaster, a note that gatecrashed the still-playing CD. Such a clear sound from a congregation of clumsy elements – wood, string, felt. Another note, clear and anachronistic in the music.
A strident machine bleat tore the calm, sending a jug of iced water down my spine. I came very close to dropping my glass, and had it not been empty, I would have spilled some of its contents. To be careful, I put it back on the desk, and as I did so the electronic shriek repeated. The phone was ringing. What does one do in these circumstances? Answer another man’s phone? It might be Oskar – what time was it in Los Angeles? My great fear was that, if I answered the phone, the person on the other end of the line might not speak English, and I would be taken for an intruder and the police would be summoned. How likely was this?
Third ring. Ring? It was like the death cry of a robot seagull. Eastern Bloc engineering, no doubt modified from the radiation leak alarm on a nuclear submarine.
Fourth ring. If it was Oskar, it was best to seem ‘in’, guarding the flat. If it was a non-Anglophone, I would just repeat Oskar’s name like an idiot. I caught the phone in the first half-second of the fifth ring, an assonant hiccup cut short.
‘Hello?’
A crackling, long-distance pause, the hiss of dust-covered copper cables. ‘Hello, hello, it is Oskar.’
‘Hello, Oskar. How are you?’
‘I am fine, I think.’ Electric emptiness loomed behind his words, and threatened to overwhelm them. I started to do mental arithmetic; Los Angeles is seven hours behind London, and I was two hours ahead; it was past 1 p.m....this was wrong.
‘What time is it there?’
‘It is late. Or early. I am jet-lagged. Are you listening to my music?’
Variations was still on. There was no room for ‘no’ in Oskar’s question. ‘Yes. It’s very good.’
‘Hrm. Is everything OK in the apartment?’
My eye strayed to the cats on the sofa and the stain on the floor. The stain was actually hidden from me by the coffee table, but I felt I could still see it; a flash burn on the retina, always in centre view until you tried to look at it, when it swam away.
‘Yes, yes, fine. I meant to ask...’
‘Yes?’
‘You mentioned a cleaner – when do they come?’
‘Does something need to be cleaned?’
Yes, everything, always. ‘No, but I just thought I should know in case I’m naked or something.’
A tram passed by, clunking into the distance, trailing with it my ability to take back what I had just said.
‘Are you naked now?’
‘No! But I don’t know if I have to be here to let them in or something.’
‘She has a key.’
‘OK.’ There was a cork on the kitchen table in front of me. My unoccupied hand picked it up and started to roll it back and forth between my fingers. Was this call really necessary? Was there some unasked question in the background, with the tinfoil shush of the line? Was Oskar waiting for some unknown reassurance from me?
‘You are having a good time?’ Oskar was in the habit of framing statements as questions – not in the infuriating Valley-speak manner of Californians, but in a more philosophical, European manner, as if preceding the quasi-query with the unspoken words We can of course both take it as read that... This, however, was a straightforward question.
‘Oh, yes. I went sightseeing yesterday – saw the National Museum...’
‘While you are there, you really should go to see the Philharmonic. You will go?’
‘Yes, maybe, if I have the time...’
‘Time? What else are you doing? The Philharmonic is in its summer season, and I helped set the programme. It is very good. Will you go tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow?’ I wanted to say that I had made plans for tomorrow, but that would have been an obvious lie. While thinking of a better lie (I almost had one), I let too long a pause bleed into the conversation.
‘Tomorrow, then,’ Oskar said, decisive and clearly cheerful at the thought of inflicting classical music on me. ‘I will call them and make arrangements for a ticket in your name.’
‘Oskar, you don’t have to...’
‘Yes, I can always get free tickets, so I will call them. Seven-thirty. It is Schubert, “The Trout” and “Death and the Maiden”. Very good. Very popular. You will like it.’
I squeezed the cork hard. Apathy and boredom fought within me. Going out seemed like such a chore, but at the very least, it was something to do. Another silence was emptying into the conversation. ‘Isn’t “Death and the Maiden” a film?’
This time, the silence unfolded on Oskar’s end of the line. ‘Ariel Dorfman wrote a play called Death and the Maiden,’ Oskar said, with the air of someone explaining a point to a slow child. ‘It is about this piece of music.’
‘But there was a film as well,’ I protested, somewhat wretchedly. A bubble of memory floated up. ‘With Sigourney Weaver.’
‘I remember it. I will make the arrangements. Goodbye for now.’
‘Um, goodbye Oskar. Thanks for calling.’
The ‘ling’ of my last word was transmitted nowhere. The call had ended.
I put the phone down, and flicked the cork into the air, trying to catch it with my other hand. It evaded my grasp and skittered and bounced across the floor, startling one of the cats, which froze for a split second and then pounced, stopping the errant stopper. Ha! I don’t know what it thought it was – a vole in a tiny barrel, perhaps. The discovery that it had captured a cylinder of soft bark didn’t seem to disappoint the cat, though. Instead, it held its prize in outstretched front paws, hindquarters hunched and tensed; then it freed the cork, batted it to one side, and pounced again. Pow!
The bottle emptied, I set down my recharged glass and tapped the cork across the floor with my foot. The cat was on top of it like a furry slingshot. It was impossible not to laugh. I hooked the cork back with the side of my foot, the cat tensed like a sprinter, and I kicked again – a tailed comet streaked across the floor. (The other cat was on the sofa, ignoring all this. What fills a cat’s mind in those idle hours of reverie? Where do they go?)
An idea occurred to me. For the third time, I retrieved the now slightly dog-eared (cat-eared?) cork – the moggie put up more of a fight this time – then punted it into the room’s most remote corner. Then, I opened one of the kitchen drawers, an out-of-the-way one that looked as if it might contain string.
Inside the drawer was a note from Oskar.
Corkscrew – in drawer by sink. Torch, batteries – in bottom drawer under sink. 1st aid box, aspirin – in bathroom. Cleaning things, candles – in pantry.
This drawer: spices.
Indeed, the drawer contained spices, and that distinctive spice-rack melange of smells. And Oskar’s note, another note. Did all the drawers contain notes like this? I had taken cutlery from a drawer, and there had been no note. Curious, I tried the next drawer along, and there was another little note, identical to the first one except for:
This drawer: Place mats. Coasters.
Two lines under coasters. It was very pleasing to see that even when he was surprising me, Oskar was, in a way, p
redictable. That made two notes – but they were not in all the drawers. Perhaps it was possible to discern Oskar’s thinking here; maybe he thought that, if I was hunting through unexpected drawers, I might be looking for items on his little treasure-hunt list. I might need them in a hurry.
I wanted string. When might Oskar use string? It occurred to me that some of Oskar’s papers in the study had been tied up with string, so I went through to look in his desk drawers and returned, triumphantly, a minute later with a piece between three and four feet long.
After a little work, the cork was tied to the end of the piece of string, and I embarked on my experiment. I flicked the tethered cork out towards my subject, the still-alert cat. It had not lost its killer passion, and went for the mark with vim, the deadly determination of a plain single girl going for a thrown bridal bouquet. But just as it reached the cylinder, I pulled on the string and yanked it away. The cat dashed in pursuit. It was a game; I wondered if the cat knew it. It cannot really have believed that it was chasing some sort of animal, a meal-in-waiting. Play – another thing that doesn’t separate us from the animals. It was possible, however, that it separated me from Oskar. Did he play with the cats like this? That was difficult to believe, but I would not have considered him capable of keeping animals in the first place. Fish, maybe, because they kept to their real estate and had simple needs that corresponded well to his scheduled mind. Instead he had made room in his life, in his flat, for such an autonomous, deranging creature as the house cat. Two, indeed.