All That Man Is (3 page)

‘You look totally fucking miserable, mate,' Ferdinand says, sitting opposite him at a table in the dining car.

‘Do I?'

‘I mean – are you okay? You don't look well.'

Ferdinand is, he thinks, making an obvious effort to patch things up.

There was a falling-out the previous day, over the travel plans.

Simon had wanted to take an early train to Prague. Ferdinand had not wanted to do this. He had wanted to take Otto up on his offer of showing them a fun time in Berlin.

Simon had, as usual, silently insisted on having his own way – and then it turned out he wanted to stop in Leipzig to visit the tomb of J. S. Bach.

He had more or less tricked him into the Leipzig stopover, Ferdinand felt, and it had been an awful experience. Ten hours in the station and the diesel-stained streets that surrounded it – the next train to Prague did not leave until the middle of the night – all for the sake of a few minutes in the frigid Thomaskirche, which Simon himself had described as ‘intrinsically unimpressive'.

Finally, at about midnight, no longer speaking, they sat down to wait on the station platform, where some young German Christians were singing songs like ‘Let It Be' and ‘Blowing in the Wind' as the rain fell past the tall lights and out on the dark tracks.

Simon seems not to have noticed the falling-out, let alone his friend's efforts, in the morning, to patch things up.

He is looking out of the window, the low sun on his handsome profile, his hands shaking slightly after the dreadful night.

‘We get to Prague in about an hour,' Ferdinand says.

‘Yeah?' From somewhere an image has entered Simon's head, an image of human life as bubbles rising through water. The bubbles rise in streams and clouds, touching and mingling and yet each remaining individually defined as they travel upwards from the depths towards the light, until at the surface they cease to exist as individual entities. In the water they existed physically, individually – in the air they are part of the air, part of an endless whole, inseparable from everything else. Yes, he thinks, squinting in the mist-softened sunlight, tears filling his eyes, that is how it is – life and death.

‘Where do you think we should stay?' Ferdinand asks.

‘I don't know.'

‘Hostel?'

‘Okay,' Simon says, still watching the landscape, the lifting mist.

It all happens very fast. Desperate-looking men wait on the platform when the train pulls in. Their upturned faces pass in the windows smoothly as the train sheds the last of its speed. The English teenagers are the subject of a tussle as they are still descending the steep steel steps, and a few minutes later are in a Skoda which is older than they are, whose engine sounds like a wasp and blows prodigious quantities of blueish exhaust. The fumes have a heady, sweetish smell. The flowering trees also. Their driver, other than his native language, speaks only a few words of German. ‘
Zimmer frei, zimmer frei
,' he had insisted at the station, physically seizing their packs and making a dash for his vehicle.

They drive for twenty minutes or so, mostly uphill (and thus very, very slowly), into a spring-greeny suburb of disintegrating tarmac and faded dwellings in small plots of land, until they pull up, finally, in front of a single-storey house with a tree in front of it, the path underneath littered and plastered with fallen blossoms. This is where their driver lives with his wife, and she speaks some English.

Birdsong meets them as they emerge from the Skoda, and she is there too, opening the squeaky front gate with enthusiasm, even a kind of impatience. She is probably about forty and looks as if she has just got out of bed. Her hair – a sort of aureate beige – is loose and unkempt, and she is wearing a yellow towelling dressing gown and blue plastic sandals. She comes forward over the blossom-thick pavement in her blue sandals, through the shattered shade that leaves flecks of light on her smooth-skinned face, smiling, and sticks a pair of kisses on each of the young visitor's faces. Then she hurries them inside and shows them to what will be their room – a single bed, a stained foam mattress on the floor, a leaf-filled window. She smiles at them as they take in the room tiredly. ‘Is okay?' she says.

She tells them to leave their things there and join her for breakfast, so they follow her along a passage with a washing machine in it, past what seems to be a nasty bathroom, and into a kitchen.

Simon is still thinking of the dream he had on the train as he follows her into the kitchen with his friend. It seems more present to him than where he is, than the washing machine he has just walked past, than the sunny kitchen where he is being told to sit down.

the only where I want to be

She
is doing something now, at this moment,
she
is doing something as he sits down at a small square table in the sunny kitchen. And the smile she showed him in his dream seems realer than the woman now taking things from the fridge and explaining to them why, in opting to stay with her, they have made the right decision.

The smile she showed him in his dream. It is possible he just inferred it. Her face was not actually smiling. Indeed, it had a serious expression. Pale, framed by her dark hair, it had a serious expression. Yet her doll-blue eyes were dense with tenderness and somehow he knew that she was smiling at him. Then he woke to the first daylight filling out the interior of the train, and the feverish sound of the train's wheels.

She says she isn't interested in money – that isn't why she takes people in. She just likes people, she says, and wants to help them. She will do everything she can to help them. ‘I will help you,' she says to them. The house, she admits, is not exactly in the centre of town, but she promises them it isn't difficult to get there. She will show them how, and while they eat she does, spreading a map on the kitchen table and tracing with her finger the way to the Metro station, though most of the route seems to lie just at the point where the map folds and the paper is worn and illegible.

They are drinking
slivovice
from little cups the shape of acorns and the air is grey and stinging with cigarette smoke. She is also, as she leans over the tattered, expansive map of Prague with its districts in different colours, being somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what – if anything – she is wearing underneath it, something that Ferdinand has noticed, and to which he has just tried to draw his friend's attention with a salacious smile and a movement of his head, when her husband steps in, takes the cigarette out of his small mouth and says something in Czech.

She tries to shoo him away, not even looking up from what she is doing – tracing something on the map, a sinuous street, with her chipped fingertip – and they have what seems to be a short, fierce dispute.

Ferdinand is still smiling salaciously.

She is still leaning over the map.

Her husband stands there for a moment, simmering with displeasure. Then he leaves, and she tells them he is off to work. He is a former professional footballer, she explains, now a PE teacher.

She sits down and lights another cigarette and lays a hand on Simon's knee. (She seems, in spite of his silence, to have taken a particular liking to Simon.) ‘My hahs-band,' she says, ‘he know
nah-thing
but football.' There is a pause. Her hand is still on his knee. ‘You understand me?'

‘Yes,' he says.

Drinking spirits so early in the morning, and after such a terrible night, has made him very woozy. He is not quite sure what is happening, what she is talking about. Everything seems unusually vivid – the sun-flooded kitchen, the pictures of kittens on the wall, the blue eyes of the footballer's wife, her fine parchment-like skin. She is holding him with a disquieting stare. His eyes fall and he finds himself looking at her narrow, naked knees.

Her eyes again.

‘He know
nah-thing
but football,' she says. He is looking at her mouth when she says that. ‘You understand me.' It does not seem to be a question this time. It sounds more like an instruction.

‘And you young boys,' she says, smiling happily, taking up the brandy bottle, ‘you like sport?'

‘I do,' Ferdinand tells her.

‘Yes?'

‘Simon doesn't.'

‘That's not true,' Simon mutters irritably.

She doesn't seem to hear that. She says, turning to him, ‘Oh, no? What do you like? What do you like? I think I know what you like!' And, putting her hand on his knee again, she starts to laugh.

‘Simon likes books,' Ferdinand says.

‘Oh, you like books! That's
nice
. I like books! Oh –' she puts her hand on her heart – ‘I
love
books. My husband, he don't like books. He is not interested in art. You are interested in art, I think?'

‘He's interested in art,' Ferdinand confirms.

‘Oh, that's
nice
!' With her eyes on Simon, she sighs. ‘Beauty,' she says. ‘Beauty, beauty. I live for beauty. Look, I show you.'

Full of excitement, she takes him to a painting hanging in the hall. A flat, lifeless landscape in ugly lurid paint. She tells him she got it in Venice.

‘It's nice,' he says.

They stand there for a minute in silence.

He is aware, as he stares at the small terrible picture, of her standing next to him, of her hand warm and heavy on his shoulder.

‘Your friend,' she says to Ferdinand, lighting another cigarette, ‘he understands.' They are in the kitchen again.

‘He's very intelligent,' Ferdinand says.

‘He understands beauty.'

‘Definitely.'

‘He
lives
for beauty. He is like me.' And then she says again, unscrewing the cap of the brandy bottle, ‘My husband, he know nothing but football.'

‘The beautiful game,' Ferdinand jokes.

She laughs, though it isn't clear whether she understood his joke. ‘You like football?' she asks.

‘I'm more of a rugby man actually,' Ferdinand says.

He then tries to explain what rugby is, while she smokes and listens, and occasionally asks questions that show she hasn't understood anything.

‘So is like football?' she asks, waving away some smoke, after several minutes of detailed explanation.

‘Uh. Sort of,' Ferdinand says. ‘Yes.'

‘And girls?' she asks. ‘You like girls?'

The question embarrasses Ferdinand less than it does Simon, and he says, after a short pause, ‘Of course we like girls.'

She laughs again. ‘Of course!'

She is looking at Simon, who is staring at the table. She says, ‘You will find lot of girls in Prague.'

Standing on the Charles bridge with its blackened statues, its pointing tourists, Simon pronounces the whole place to be a soulless Disneyland.

In St Vitus cathedral, wandering around in the quiet light and the faint smell of wood polish, he sees a poster for a performance of Mozart's Mass in C Minor there later that afternoon which marginally perks him up, and when they have acquired tickets, they sit down on the terrace of a touristy pub opposite the cathedral's flank to wait.

Unusually for him, Ferdinand is smoking a cigarette, one of Simon's Philip Morrises. While his friend tells him how much he hates Prague, Ferdinand notices two young women sitting at a nearby table. They are not, perhaps, the lovelies their landlady had promised – they are okay, though. More than okay, one of them. He tries to hear what they are saying, to hear what language they are speaking. They are not locals, obviously.

‘How can you be
happy
as a tourist?' Simon is saying. ‘Always wandering around, always at a loose end, searching for things …'

‘You're in a good mood.'

‘I'm not in a
bad
mood – I'm just saying …'

The girls seem to be English. ‘What about
them
?' Ferdinand says quietly.

‘What
about
them?' Simon asks.

‘Well?'

Simon makes a face, a sort of pained or impatient expression.

‘Oh, come on!' Ferdinand says. ‘They're not that bad. They're alright. They're nicer than the ones in Warsaw.'

‘Well, that's not hard …'

‘Well, I
am
, if you know what I mean.' Ferdinand laughs. ‘I'm going to ask them to join us.'

Simon sighs impatiently and, his hands shaking slightly, lights another cigarette. He watches as Ferdinand, with enviable ease, slides over to the girls and speaks to them. He points to the table where Simon is sitting, and Simon quickly looks away, looks up at the reassuring blackened Gothic bulk of St Vitus. He is still looking at it, or pretending to, when Ferdinand's voice says, ‘This is my friend Simon.'

He turns into the sun, squints. They are standing there, holding their drinks. One of them is wearing a sun hat. Ferdinand gestures for them to sit down, which they do, uncertainly. ‘So,' Ferdinand says, taking a seat himself, with a loud scraping noise and a sort of exaggerated friendliness, ‘how do you like Prague? How long have you been here? We only arrived this morning – we haven't seen much yet, have we, Simon?'

Simon shakes his head. ‘No, not really.'

‘We had a look in there,' Ferdinand says. ‘Simon likes cathedrals.' The girls give him a quick glance, as if expecting him to confirm or deny this, but he says nothing. ‘Have you been in there?' Ferdinand asks, directing his question particularly to the one in the sun hat, who is much more attractive than her friend.

‘Yeah, yesterday,' she says.

‘Quite impressive, isn't it.'

She laughs. ‘It's okay,' she says, as if she thinks Ferdinand might have been joking.

‘I mean, they're all the same, I suppose,' he says. ‘We've been to pretty much every one in this part of Europe, so I can say that with some authority.'