Hand Me Down World (16 page)

One afternoon at the zoo I had started to broach the subject, broadly, in a roundabout fashion, when Ralf was diverted by the crowd building outside the pen of the stone-eating
trampeltiers
and so mid-flight, as it were, I was forced to break from the transcendent whiteness of the Antarctic plains to describe a long camel-like jaw thoughtfully rolling a stone around in its mouth before spitting it out and licking up another stone from the pile.

We made our way to the zoo beach. We were the only ones there. It was very hot. Ralf was in his yellow Pierre Cardin, which helped to lift him out of his usual undertaker's austerity. The top button on his shirt was left undone as a concession to the heat. The small eyes of the carapace of netting over that beach that had shone with ice crystals all winter now showered his talcum-white face with sunshine. His eyes were closed. He was basking, which is what every other animal in the zoo was doing. His head rested on his shoulders, his mouth open to old caps of mercury and spidery lines of saliva. I urged my gaze back into that intimate space we normally reserve for those asleep, lovers, small children absorbed in play, pets and babies and the dead. I was about bring up the woodcuts when he said, ‘God, this feels good, doesn't it, Defoe? I haven't felt this good in a very long time.'

Well, after that, all I could do was mutter agreement and sit on my hands.

I considered the options. It's possible Ralf had sold the woodcuts. He never spoke about them with any affection. The painting was different. Years ago, he had told me, he and Hannah had come across the seascape in a Hamburg gallery. They weren't buyers or particularly interested in art but as soon as Ralf saw it he exclaimed to Hannah, ‘That's Rügen!' He had spent the war years there in an orphanage. He said his father was killed in the war and his mother was officially registered as ‘missing' after the heavy bombing of Berlin. He said he and the other boys used to listen in bed at night to the hail off the Ostsee striking against the wooden shutters and pretend they were under attack. Anyway, in the Hamburg gallery while Ralf had been unable to move away from the green and black sea battling its way ashore to the white cliffs of Rügen it had been Hannah who insisted they buy it. They went away and returned a few times until, exasperated by Ralf's indecision, she bought it. They brought it back to Berlin on the train. Each time they had moved in Berlin—three times in all—the new apartment was inspected with a view to a likely wall for the painting of the Rügen shore. I could not imagine Ralf casually selling it.

It was late May. The skies were lighter, especially from the roof garden of Wertheim, where I liked to go to read one of the English-language newspapers.

One afternoon I am on the escalators heading down to ground level when I see Ines through the large front department store windows. She is waiting at the lights to cross the road. This was one of those rare moments—Ines, by herself, and outside of the apartment. The lights changed and she bent down to pick up something. When I saw the large bag I knew I was going to follow her. It seemed as obvious and as inevitable as discreetly leaving the supermarket had been the other time. Yet outside Wertheim I found myself stalling again and the crowd broke around me. I suppose the thing was to walk up alongside her and tap her on the shoulder. A store detective would feel within his rights to do so. But then a store detective has a refined language with which to disarm a shoplifter and win the offender's cooperation.

The lights changed again and I felt the pull of the crowd setting off across the road. And when I saw her disappear around the corner of the building I set off after her. I still hadn't arrived at a plan. It was more a case of wanting to prolong the option of following her. The important thing was to keep her in view.

Up ahead of me now—floating away like a brightly coloured lure spinning and drifting through the late afternoon crowd. I hurried after, running in front of a bus, then chastened by that near miss I decide to wait at the next lights, where some months earlier I had been told off by a woman, a complete stranger, who dressed me down for setting a bad example to children by jay walking. Under such circumstances my natural instinct is always to yell back some abuse, get my own back, because above all what is more important than one's own dignity, and then it sank in. Yes, the woman was right—she was right, I was wrong—I had set a poor example regarding road safety, and good on her as well for speaking her mind and not looking the other way or holding her tongue but for saying what needed to be said. Oh, for an ounce of her courage. What could be worse than the risk of causing offence—a bundle of smiles without a stitch of courage to hold them together? So as I wait at the lights the world slows down. Tourists, hustlers on skateboards. Beggars. A young mother pushed on the pedals of her bike, a tiny boy with a crash helmet behind her in a cart. A man lit a cigarette and inhaled with a tilt of a head that paid homage to the skies and all the days lived so far—marriage, children, affairs, social soccer games, hernia and appendix operations, crowns and stitches—and then that was that, I couldn't wait any longer. I sprang across the road. I thought I heard a mother cry out. No. I heard all the young mothers in Berlin howling at my back. Of course I imagined that part. Nonetheless my cheeks were burning.

This is how I came to follow her up the station escalators onto the S-Bahn and across the city to Warschauer. Here was a part of Berlin I didn't know at all. Broken down, graffiti everywhere, broken glass and hungry ground-sniffing dogs, gypsy men drinking beer at the platform kiosk, drunks sprawled everywhere rattling cans at the legs of passing commuters. As the crowd came off the bridge the neighbourhood softened to glimpses of cobbled side-streets and balconies with hanging flower pots. Traffic noise gave an impression of congestion but there wasn't any. The noise is deposited here from the distant boulevards of Karl Marx and Frankfurter Allee. I mention it because it encouraged me to think of myself as lost in a big city crowd in the event of Ines turning around to find me. But she never did. She didn't once look back.

She turned off the main road with the tramlines into a narrow street of apartment buildings with ground-floor businesses, cafes,
bäckereien
and newsagents, and as she crossed the road I noted the shop where she disappeared and I popped into a laundrette, where I waited with the washing thumping inside the driers. In the filthy window I saw a reflection I hardly recognised. The long winter had done something to me. Blurred some essential lines to do with self.

I didn't have long to wait, ten minutes or so, before she reappeared, this time with the bag folded under her arm. I moved to the door of the laundrette. She seemed to take forever to reach the end of the street. It occurred to me it was deliberate, that she was waiting for me to catch her—a crazy idea then and now, and yet look at the way she walked, more erect and more measured than normal as though straining against a leash that neither held her back nor would let her get too far ahead.

I crossed the road and entered the shop. It was jammed with junk of every kind: book cases, accordions, teapots, a very old dentist chair, hammered tin pots, old furniture, card tables, photographs, paintings. Within a minute I saw two beautifully hand-painted vases that I recognised. The funny thing is I hadn't noticed them gone from the apartment. But as soon as I set eyes on them I was able to place them on the long narrow table behind the sofa on which I usually sat. I glanced up at a crowded wall, and there was Ralf's beloved shoreline at Rügen. How she managed to get it out of the apartment and across town I'll never know. The shopkeeper arrived silently at my side. For the moment we both stood there gazing up at the painting. He spoke in German, then, as I opened my mouth, switched to English. It was a fine work, I agreed. However, there in the pile-up of the second-hand shop I could see what was wrong with it. I suppose it's neither here nor there given the more important discovery of Ines' pilfering. But the persistent presence of the shopkeeper forced my eye back into that seascape. The sea was a blue-green stew with chop and spray and yet as far as I could tell the wind had no telling effect elsewhere in the painting. The clouds are too sedate, almost stationary. Most of the painting is given over to sky. One of those skies you see tilting back from a plane window—sea, sky and land all coming at one another. In a more admiring tone this time the shopkeeper said, ‘A very fine painting. One hundred euros.' The quickness with which I accepted seemed to surprise him. Already I was planning ahead. I would need a taxi to ferry it across town. I could remount it and Ralf would be none the wiser. Of course there would be Ines to deal with—as soon as she saw the painting there would be the double shock of realising she had been followed. She would feel betrayed. We would have to sit down and find a way through that.

I bought the two vases as well. While the shopkeeper wrapped them I poked around in a back room filled largely with electric guitars. There I found the box with the woodcuts. When I placed it on the counter the shopkeeper looked up. The brown eyes that had so enthusiastically endorsed the painting of Rügen began to look concerned. He put his hands on the counter. ‘Is there something wrong? Something I should know?' he asked. ‘No,' I told him. There was nothing that he needed to know.

I left the shop feeling pleased. Some of the indignation I had felt on Ralf's behalf was gone. In its place was a quiet ambient state of neutrality as I walked up the street, laden, in search of a taxi.

It is two days later. I've had to wait for Ines to leave the apartment on one of her mysterious errands. In the other room I can hear Ralf's talking book. Without any difficulty I place the painting and the woodcuts back on the wall and the vases on the table behind the sofa and slip out and downstairs to my room. For the next hour I am too restless to sit at my desk. I can't read. My concentration is all over the place. At some point I hear the cage-lift doors open and bang shut, the telltale footsteps of Ines on the landing, then on the floorboards above. The footsteps trail down to Ralf's end of the apartment. I'm waiting for them to stop, but they travel past the wall with the woodcuts and the end wall with the painting. Then they travel back—again without pause— all the way up to the kitchen.

That afternoon it is my turn to take Ralf out to the park. When the time comes I climb the stairs but without any of the earlier excitement. I feel more like a slug returning to its hole in the mud.

I push on the door. It has been left ajar. The floorboards give me away. Ralf calls across from his corner of the room. He hopes I won't mind waiting. But he needs a blast of coffee before we go out. So I sit with him to wait for Ines to appear with the tray. That's when I notice one of the hand-painted vases. Ines has taken it from the table behind the sofa and placed it on the low table between me and Ralf. She means me to see it.

To make space for the tray she carefully moves the vase to the corner of the table near Ralf. She sets out the cups and the coffee plunger. It is always like this, a painful and methodical process. She delights in the meticulous placement of each cup and saucer and the silver teaspoons and sugar bowl. As if we cannot be trusted with the task of doing it for ourselves. We perch forward—Ralf too, with a dropped lower jaw. She pours his first. Then she pours mine. When she passed the cup to me I did not see anything approaching fear or apprehension or anger, if anything it was a look of shared understanding, which irritated me the more.

Now came one of those farcical moments where you see the outcome before it has happened and at the same time remain powerless to prevent it. Ralf reaches for the sugar. It is where it is always placed for his convenience. But, of course, the world has been rearranged. He doesn't know about the vase. When he knocked it the vase pirouetted for a moment—as if it could not make up its mind whether to fall or remain as it was. Then it fell, noisily, smashing over the floor. I saw it happen in slow motion but did nothing to prevent it happening. I remained frozen and perversely committed to the inevitable outcome. Well, Ralf bounced up from his chair. He began to curse himself, his blindness, his clumsiness. Then it dawned. What was the vase doing there on the coffee table? It didn't usually sit there. ‘Ines?' he asked. Without any hesitation, much to my surprise, she said it was her fault. She'd put the vase there while she was cleaning the table behind the sofa. She must have forgotten it.

‘Oh,' said Ralf, relieved more than anything.

I knelt down on the floor to help Ines with the broken pieces. We picked through them on our hands and knees. We would have looked as though we were taking this job very seriously indeed, but the stillness with which we went about it was really our acute awareness of the other. I hadn't been this close to Ines since ice-skating and that other time in the zoo when the brute cold saw me shift my arm around her. For months on end she had been geographically apart—to Ralf's left side, upstairs, in the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. But here, on the floor, she was close enough for me to smell her, her shop scent. The top two buttons of her housemaid's shirt were undone and I could see the pale of her breasts and the shine of her skin. I could feel her heat. I could hear her breath. These observations were like images passing in a window. A horse in a paddock, a lake, a tree, there goes a patch of sky, a flock of starlings over a field of maize—things which on their own don't amount to much but together contribute to a general feeling of contentment. Well, my itemising of Ines' attributes, her skin, her fast shallow breaths— they will all have to stand for a blooming of desire.

The things that had kept us apart—the ceiling, the floorboards, suspicion, fear—all of that fell away as we knelt shoulder to shoulder and worked around the stubborn feet of our blind benefactor. Our sides touched, we breathed in and out with one another. Best of all, and I was sure of this, at least at the time I was, I recognised in Ines my own attempt to delay finding all the broken pieces, which was a desire for things to carry on as they were. All of this without either one of us having uttered so much as a word.