by Ian Mcewan
In his room he was obsessed by the diminishing pile of boxes on the floor and the growing number of machines on the shelves. He persuaded himself he was emptying the boxes for Maria. This was the test of endurance, the labor he had to perform to be worthy. This was the work he dedicated to her. He tore into the cardboard with his hunting knife and destroyed it for her sake. He also thought how much bigger his room would be when his task was complete, and of how he would rearrange his work space. He planned lighthearted notes to Maria, suggesting with skillful unconcern that they meet in a pub near her flat. By the time he was home in Platanenallee, not so long before midnight, he was too tired to remember the precise order of words, and too tired to begin again.
Years later, Leonard had no difficulty at all recalling Maria’s face. It shone for him, the way faces do in certain old paintings. In fact there was something almost two-dimensional about it; the hairline was high on the forehead, and at the other end of this long and perfect oval, the jaw was both delicate and forceful, so that when she tilted her head in a characteristic and endearing way, her face appeared as a disk, more of a plane than a sphere, such as a master artist might draw with one inspired stroke. The hair itself was peculiarly fine, like a baby’s, and often wriggled free of the childish clips women wore then. Her eyes were serious, though not mournful, and were green or gray, according to the light. It was not a lively, animated face. She was a habitual daydreamer, often distracted by a line of thought she was unwilling to share, and her most typical expression was one of dreamy watchfulness, the head slightly lifted and tipped an inch or so to one side, the forefinger of her left hand playing with her lower lip. If one spoke to her after a silence, she might jump. It was the sort of face, the sort of manner, onto which men were likely to project their own requirements. One could read womanly power into her silent abstraction, or find a childlike dependency in her quiet attentiveness. On the other hand, it was possible she actually embodied these contradictions. For example, her hands were small, and she cut her fingernails short, like a child’s, and never painted them. But she did take care to paint her toenails a lurid red or orange. Her arms were thin, and it was surprising what slight loads she could not raise, what unjammed windows she could not shift. And yet her legs, though slim, were muscular and powerful, perhaps from all the cycling she did before the gloomy treasurer scared her off and her bike was stolen from the communal cellar.
For the twenty-five-year-old Leonard, who had not seen her for five days, who struggled all day with cardboard and wood shavings, and whose only token was the smaller piece of cardboard bearing her address, the face was elusive. The more intensely he summoned it, the more provocative was its disintegration. In fantasy he had only an outline to play with, and even that wavered in the heat of his scrutiny. There were scenes he wanted to play out, approaches that had to be tested, and all his memory would permit was a certain presence, sweet and alluring, but invisible. And the inner ear was deaf to the way she had intoned an English sentence. He began to wonder if he would recognize her in the street. All he knew for certain was the effect on himself of spending ninety minutes with her at a table in a dance hall. He had loved the face. Now the face was gone and all that remained was the love, with too little to feed on. He had to see her again.
He had lost count of the days. It was on the eighth or ninth that Glass let him rest. All the machines had been unpacked, and twenty-six of them had been tested and fitted with signal activation. Leonard slept in an extra two hours, dozing in an erotic fug of bed warmth. Then he shaved and took a bath, and with only a towel around his waist strolled about the apartment, rediscovering it and feeling grand and proprietorial. He heard the scrape of the decorators’ stepladder downstairs. It was a workday for everyone else, Monday perhaps. He had time at last to experiment with his ground coffee. It was not an outright success, with the grounds and undissolved milk powder rolling with the convection in the cup, but he was happy to be breakfasting alone on Belgian chocolate, poking his bare feet between the blades of the scalding radiator and planning his campaign. There was a letter from home to read. He opened it casually with a knife, as though receiving letters was what he did every morning at breakfast. “Just a line to say thanks for yours and glad you’re settling in …”
He had it in mind to work on his undemanding note to Maria, but it did not seem right to start that until he was fully dressed. Then, when he was, and the letter was written (You were kind enough to give me your address last week when we met at the Rest, so I hope you won’t be troubled to hear from me, or feel obliged to reply …), the thought of waiting at least three days for her answer was more than he could bear. By then he would be back in the dream world of his windowless room and fifteen-hour day.
He poured a second cup of coffee. The grounds had sunk. He had another plan. He would deliver a note for her to find when she came in from work. He would write that he happened to be passing and would be in a certain Kneipe on a certain nearby street at six o’clock. He could fill the blanks in later. He set to immediately. Half a dozen drafts later he was still not satisfied. He wanted to be eloquent and casual. It was important that she should think he had scribbled the note as he stood outside her door, that he had called by hoping to find her in and only then remembered that she went out to work. He did not want her to feel under pressure, and, more important, he did not want to appear earnest and foolish.
By lunchtime his attempts lay all about him and the final copy was in his hands. I happened to be in your area so I thought I’d pop up and say hello. He folded it into an envelope, which he sealed in error. He took the knife and opened it, imagining himself to be her, alone at her table, just in from work. He spread the letter out and read it twice, as she might. It was perfectly judged. He found another envelope and stood. There were all the hours of the afternoon before him, but he knew there was nothing he could do to stop himself leaving now. He was in the bedroom changing into his best suit. He was taking the worn scrap of cardboard from yesterday’s trousers, even though he had memorized the address. He had the street plan opened out on the unmade bed. He was thinking of his bright red knitted tie. He was unbuttoning his traveling shoe-care kit and buffing his best black shoes as he studied his route.
To fill out the time and to savor the expedition, he walked to the Ernst-Reuter-Platz station before taking the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. Almost too soon he was on Adalbertstrasse. No. 84 would be less than a five-minute walk. Here was the worst bomb damage he had seen. It would have been dismal enough without it. There were apartment-house facades drilled by small-arms fire, especially around the doors and windows. Every second or third building had a gutted interior and was without its roof. Whole structures had collapsed, and the rubble lay where it had fallen, with roof beams and rusted guttering poking from the heaps. After almost two weeks in the city, during which he had shopped, eaten, commuted and worked, his earlier pride in its destruction seemed puerile, repellent.
As he crossed Oranienstrasse and saw building work on a cleared site, he was pleased. He also saw a bar and went toward it. It was called Bei Tante Else, and it would do. He took out his note and inserted the name and the street in the blanks. Then, as an afterthought, he stepped inside. He paused beyond the leather curtain to accustom his eyes to the dark. It was a cramped and narrow place, almost a tunnel. Beyond the bar was a group of women drinking at one of the tables. One of them fingered the base of her neck to draw attention to Leonard’s tie and pointed. “Keine Kommunisten hier!” Her friends laughed. For a moment he thought from their manner and faked glamour they might all have just come from a boisterous office party. Then he realized they were prostitutes. Elsewhere there were men asleep with their heads on the tables. As he backed out, another of the women called after him, and there was more laughter.
Back on the pavement, he hesitated. This was no place to meet Maria. Nor did he wish to sit in there alone and wait for her. On the other hand, he could not alter his note without ruining its cas
ual appearance, so he decided he would wait outside in the street, and when Maria came he would apologize and confess his ignorance of the area. It would be something to talk about. It might even strike her as funny.
No. 84 was an apartment building like all the others. A curving line of bullet marks above the tops of the ground-floor windows was probably machine-gun fire. A wide entrance brought him into a dark central courtyard. Weeds were growing between the cobblestones. Recently emptied dustbins lay on their sides. It was quiet. Kids were still at school. Indoors, late lunches or suppers were being prepared. He could smell cooking fat and onions. Suddenly he missed his daily steak and chips.
Across the courtyard was what he took to be the Hinterhaus. He walked to it and stepped through a narrow doorway. He was at the base of a steep wooden staircase. There were two doors on each landing. He rose through babies’ cries, wireless music, laughter and, higher up, a man calling with a plaintive stress on the second syllable, “Papa? Papa? Papa?” He was an intruder. The elaborate dishonesty of his mission began to oppress him. He took the envelope from his pocket, ready to post it through the door and descend as quickly as he could. Her apartment was at the very top. Its ceiling was lower than the rest, and this too made him anxious to leave. Her door was a freshly painted green, unlike the others. He pushed the envelope through, and then he did an inexplicable thing, quite out of character.
His upbringing had instilled a simple faith in the inviolability of property. He never took a short cut if it involved trespass, he never borrowed without first asking permission, and he never stole from shops like some of his friends at school. He was an overscrupulous observer of other people’s privacy. Whenever he came across lovers kissing in a private place, he always felt it proper to avert his eyes, even though he longed to go closer and watch. So it made no sense now that without pausing to reflect, and without even a cursory knock on the door, he took hold of the handle and turned it. Perhaps he expected it to be locked, and perhaps therefore this was one of those meaningless little actions with which daily life is filled. The door yielded to him and swung open wide, and there she was, standing right before him.
Six
The apartments at the rear of the old Berlin buildings were traditionally the cheapest and most cramped. They had once housed the servants, whose masters lived in the grander quarters at the front, facing the road. Those at the rear had windows facing onto the courtyard, or across a narrow space to the next building. It was a mystery, then, which Leonard never bothered to penetrate, how late-afternoon winter sunshine was able to spill out from the open bathroom door across the floor between them, a reddish-gold slanting pillar of light that picked out motes turning in the air. It could have been light reflected from an adjacent window; it did not matter. At the time it seemed an auspicious sign. Just in front of the wedge of sunlight lay the envelope. Beyond it, perfectly still, stood Maria. She wore a thick tartan skirt and a red cashmere sweater, American made, a present from the devoted treasurer which she had neither the selflessness nor the hardness of heart to return.
They stared at each other across the light, and neither of them spoke. Leonard was trying to formulate a greeting in the form of an apology. But how to explain away something so willed as the opening of a door? Confusing his responses was his joy in having her beauty confirmed. He had been right to be so disturbed. For her part, during the seconds before she recognized him, Maria had been immobilized by fear. This sudden apparition stirred ten-year-old memories of soldiers, usually in pairs, pushing open doors unannounced. Leonard misjudged her expression as the understandable hostility of a householder for an intruder. And he misread the quick faint smile of recognition and relief as forgiveness.
Testing his luck, he advanced a couple of steps and put out his hand. “Leonard Marnham,” he said. “You remember. The Resi?”
Even though she no longer felt she was in danger, Maria took a step backward and crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want?”
It worked in Leonard’s favor that he was so put out by such a direct question. He blushed, fumbled, and then for an answer picked up the envelope and handed it to her. She opened it, spread out the single sheet, and before reading glanced over the top to make sure he was coming no closer. The flash of the whites of those serious eyes! Leonard stood helpless. He remembered his father reading his mediocre end-of-term reports in his presence. Just as he had imagined, she read the note over twice.
“What does it mean, this ‘pop up’? Just to open my door, is this a pop up?” He was about to offer an explanation, but she was beginning to laugh. “And you wish that I come to Bei Tante Else? Tante Else, the Nuttenkneipe?” To his amazement, she began to sing. It was from a number they were always playing on AFN, “Take Back Your Mink.” What made him think that she was one of those girls? To be mocked by the impossible sweetness of a German girl’s attempt at a Bronx accent—Leonard thought he might faint. He was miserable, he was exhilarated. Desperate for composure, he used his little finger to settle his specs on the bridge of his nose. “Actually,” he began, but she was stepping round him to the door and saying mock sternly, “And why have you come to see me without the flower in the hair?” She closed the door and locked it. She was all smiles as she clasped her hands. It really seemed to be the case, she was delighted to see him. “Now,” she said. “Isn’t it time for tea?”
The room they were in was approximately ten feet by ten. Without standing on tiptoe, Leonard could press his palm against the ceiling. The view from the window was across the courtyard to a wall of similar windows. By standing up close and peering down, it was possible to see the dustbins lying on their sides. Maria had removed an advanced English grammar from the only comfortable chair so that he could sit while she busied herself in the curtained recess. Leonard could see his breath in the air, so he kept his coat on. He had grown used to overheated American interiors at the warehouse, and every room in his apartment had a ferocious radiator regulated from somewhere in the basement. He was shivering, but here even the cold was charged with possibility. He was sharing it with Maria.
By the window was a dining table on which stood a cactus in a bowl. Next to it was a candle in a wine bottle. There were two kitchen chairs, a bookcase and a stained Persian rug laid on bare boards. Pinned to the wall by what Leonard took to be the bedroom door was a black-and-white reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, cut out from a magazine. There was nothing else to look at apart from a jumble of shoes in a corner heaped around an iron cobbler’s last. Maria’s room could not have resembled less the polished and orderly clutter of the Marnham living room in Tottenham, with its mahogany radio/record player and the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a special case. This room made no claims. It would be possible to leave tomorrow without regret, taking nothing. It was a room that managed to be both spare and untidy. It was grubby and intimate. It might be possible to say exactly what you felt here. You could begin again with yourself. To one who had grown up edging round his mother’s porcelain figurines, ever careful not to mark her walls with his fingers, it was strange and wonderful that this unfussy stripped-down room should belong to a woman.
She was emptying a teapot into the small kitchen sink where two saucepans balanced on top of a pile of dirty plates. He was sitting at the dining table watching the thick material of her skirt, how it moved in delayed motion, how the warm cashmere just covered the tops of the pleats and how she wore football socks inside carpet slippers. All this winter wool was reassuring to Leonard, who felt easily threatened by a provocatively dressed woman. Wool suggested undemanding intimacy, and body warmth, and a body hiding cosily, demurely, in the folds. She was making tea in the English style. She had a coronation caddy, and she was warming the pot. This too put Leonard at his ease.
In response to his question, she was telling him that when she had first started work at Twelve Armoured Workshops, REME, it had been her job to make tea three times a day for the CO and the second-in-command. She set down on the table two
Army issue white mugs, exactly the same as the ones he had in his apartment. He had been entertained to tea a number of times by young women, but he had never met one who did not trouble to decant the milk into a jug.
She sat across from him and they warmed their hands around the big mugs. He knew from experience that unless he made a formidable effort, a pattern was waiting to impose itself: a polite inquiry would elicit a polite response and another question. Have you lived here long? Do you travel far to your work? Is it your afternoon off? The catechism would have begun. Only silences would interrupt the relentless tread of question and answer. They would be calling to each other over immense distances, from adjacent mountain peaks. Finally he would be desperate for the relief of heading away with his own thoughts, after the awkward goodbyes. Even now, they had already retreated from the intensity of their greeting. He had asked her about tea making. One more like that, and there would be nothing he could do.
She had set down her mug and had put her hands deep in the pockets of her skirt. She was tapping her slippered feet on the rug. Her head was cocked, with expectation perhaps, or was she marking time to the tune in her head? Was it still the song she had teased him with? He had never known a woman tap her feet, but he knew he must not panic.
It was an assumption, lodged deep, beyond examination or even awareness, that the responsibility for the event was entirely his. If he could not find the easy words to bring them closer, the defeat would be his alone. What could he say that was neither trivial nor intrusive? She had taken up her mug again and was looking at him now with a half-smile that did not quite part her lips. “Aren’t you lonely living here by yourself?” sounded too wheedlingly suggestive. She might think he was offering to move in.