Hand Me Down World (17 page)

That night I can't sleep for all the movement in the apartment above. The light is off but I am very awake. I've listened to the shower running. These are the usual last gasps from the world above before silence descends. But then I hear feet trailing along the hall. These are footsteps that don't want to be heard. I hear the door open on the landing. A few moments later there is a knock on my door. She knocked quietly, but not tentatively, no, that would have meant something else; it's a quietly confident tap that I understand and so when I opened it there was no excuse me, or polite preliminaries. I was surprised to see she was wearing her maid's uniform. I hadn't seen it on her for some time. Why she chose to wear it I have no idea. But I've already given that detail more thought than I did at the time. Without a word said she took off her clothes. When I felt her mouth on mine I felt her hunger. I am mindful of Ines as I write this. She won't approve of me unveiling her before a stranger.

But I will say this. At night geography is the first thing to disappear. The Ines I knew, the one tottering across Ralf's apartment with a tea-tray, the Ines with discreet glances, that one was now a stranger. The woman under me arched and fed me into her. She clenched her thighs and she grunted. And where was I in all of this? Part of me was an astonished spectator, pleased and surprised by what I had stumbled upon in the clearing.

Afterwards we lay back in that narrow bed, Ines with her head resting on my arm. Her leg hooked over mine. A few months earlier I was stepping around her in the kitchen, taking care not to intrude. Now I casually moved my hand to her small warm breast. Just at that moment I doubt there was a happier man alive. It was so nice to lie there in the dark and feel fortunate without thinking how this intimacy had been won or arrived at or what would happen next. Actually, what happened next was quite straightforward. Ines announced she was hungry, and just like that we got up and dressed. Ines snuck upstairs to get her coat.

As we left the building I dropped youthfully down the front entrance steps into the waiting night where everything else felt new. The air. The trees. The neighbourhood. Not a word was said about the accident with the vase.

And Ines? When I think back I see a side of her that I didn't dwell on at the time. It was as I pulled out of her. Her face went blank as a sheet. As though any capacity for emotion had been rolled out of her face. She could offer only eye, nose, mouth. Though later as we closed the gate outside Ralf's she did smile up at me. And further along the street she did reach up and kiss me.

We caught the U near the zoo. I noticed our faces caught in the window reflection. Mine and a young black woman's. Who would have thought? Not me, certainly not during the bleak winter months when I had walked the neighour's dog up to the top of the Mt Victoria lookout, and there, under the weathered bust of the arctic explorer Robert Peary, man and dog had leant into the teeth of a filthy gale. Ines waved back at my smile in the window. We ended up at a rotisserie chicken place near the Kreuzberg canal. I thought it was a long way to come. But then I saw its value. That is, I saw it how Ines did. Two euros for half a chicken. I paid for two half-chickens. We stood up at a counter to eat. The skin was crusted with salt. Ines licked at it with a wordless relish. When she caught me watching her, her jaws stopped moving, however, her teeth remained stuck in the white flesh. After that, she nibbled at the chicken pretending it was corn.

On our way home we walked as we had earlier, side by side, completely at ease with each other. There was just us.
Us
was a whole new idea. We found ourselves following the canal. She held my hand. We stopped to admire the white swans gliding out from under the bridges; funnily enough the woodcuts entered my thoughts, but then Ines pressed my hand and the thought departed.

By the time we reached the zoo end of Tiergarten I was nearly falling over with tiredness. It was a relief to turn into Ralf's street. I thumped up the stairs on heavy legs, by now very keen on the idea of bed. Secretly I hoped Ines would carry on up to the next landing. That's how tired I was. Instead she came to my door as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if this is what we had done every night these past weeks and months. When we undressed and got into bed it was baffling to think that there had been a time when we slept in separate beds, so thoroughly did this new arrangement eclipse the old chaste one. Ines turned on her side. I lay on my back. I thought about telling her how I liked to follow her feet across the ceiling. Instead, something unrehearsed and completely different came out.

I said, ‘Ines, why have you been taking Ralf's things?'

She turned over onto her back. I propped myself onto an elbow and stroked her bare shoulder.

‘Ines?' I asked.

‘For money,' she answered. There she seemed prepared to leave it, as if that explanation was reasonable enough, and surely I understood as much. But I pressed her further.

Why, I asked, did she need money so much that she had to steal?

This time she rolled away from under my stroking hand, onto her side, and shifted closer to the wall.

A few seconds later she sleepily answered. ‘To pay a lawyer.' She yawned back at the wall. ‘To process my residency application,' she said.

Why not ask Ralf for his help? Ralf knew a lot of people. I also knew how much he depended on Ines.

She sat up, and pulled the sheet to herself. In the dark her eyes were whiter than ever.

‘You must not say a word about the lawyer to him. Promise,' she said. And when I didn't answer quickly enough her hand shook my shoulder. ‘Promise.'

‘Ok,' I said. ‘I promise.'

And because my mumbled reply mustn't have convinced there was a fresh round of promises to agree to. It was her secret and she wished to keep it that way. She did not want the ‘authorities' involved. She did not want to worry Ralf. She needed to do this thing on her own. It was complicated. There was a risk she would be deported. I wasn't to say a word to him. It was a private matter. I should respect her. And because I didn't reply straightaway she added that I ought to understand because I had private matters that she knew I wouldn't want discussed with the blind gentleman, and as she said that, in an instant—just as it is said of someone caught in death's spiral where their entire life rushes past their eyes—I saw my life in Berlin flash by, the dissolution of everything, the loss of Ines, and the hard, stinging criticism that would surely come from Ralf. And, as it also seemed, there was not just me standing at the window farewelling that life. Ines was also there, by my side, so that the threat passed silently between us, unsaid but acknowledged. And when the woodcuts disappeared for the second time shortly afterwards I didn't pursue the matter.

For several weeks Ines came to my bed every night. The arrangement wasn't entirely satisfactory. She couldn't sleep for keeping an ear open to upstairs. Ralf was in the habit of waking in the night. He could manage on his own to the bathroom. But further afield, to the kitchen, say, he needed Ines' help.

So we changed the arrangement. At a late hour when I was sure Ralf was asleep I let myself into the apartment and crept along the floorboards to Ines' room.

During the day when the creature assembled, Ines would be frustratingly near, but the old man's crusty chin was in the way, and his pink hanging ear lobe more noticeable than ever, more intrusive, bordering on offensive. I thought I detected an inward change in Ralf. His face was as closed as a paper clip. His silences were drawn out. I wondered what he made of the lighter spirits around him? We didn't quite hold hands, but our shoulders touched. Then I would notice the stillness of Ralf's head. There was awareness. Memory was ticking over, catching up.

Rain has forced us inside the aquarium. Here we stand before the endless varieties. It is like describing carpet. Yet one of the tanks contains an extraordinary creature dredged up from the permanent night that exists at great oceanic depth.

Organs and tissue float and drift on the end of cords attached to a parachute of more tissue. When it pulls down on the cords the parachute propels it upwards. The moment it achieves equilibrium it begins its descent—which is almost a collapse of will—before regathering itself to begin the exercise all over again. The cords are long and spaghetti-like and wrap around one another. Entangled and untangling. It seemed less an organism than a quest to stay aloft and find form.

As I passed this on to Ralf, it might have been a description of our little household as well.

One night I have gotten up for a pee. Outside Ines' room I stop and stare into the dark of the hall. Something is shambling towards me. The light from the far windows caught Ralf's blind face. Perhaps he'd heard noises and was coming to investigate. In his hand he held a pair of long-bladed scissors. We are no more than twenty paces from one another, Ralf in his striped pyjamas, and me, naked as I have never been in his company. In Ralf I am reminded of the ostrich we saw at the zoo at the start of the winter. That is how Ralf looked, as if he expected the attack to come from behind. I waited and he waited and then at last the old man turned and passed out of the light from the window and into the far shadows at his end of the hall.

I told Ines, which turned out to be a mistake because that night was also the last time I stayed in her room. After that I was reliant on her tiptoeing down the stairs to my door. Whether she turned up or not was entirely up to her. The visits became more sporadic, then dished out in a system of rewards for my silence, my complicity, and later, money.

seventeen

More things disappeared from Ralf's apartment. The silverware— all of it except three sets of knives, forks and spoons—the pewter beer mugs that used to line the cabinet inside the entrance, and that was just the start. I made another trip to the second-hand goods shop intending to buy everything back. But Ines had found another outlet. The shopkeeper who was so welcoming when I first came in looked almost bereft to see me walk out without buying anything.

I told Ines I would give her money, but she had to stop taking the old man's things. It would be my contribution to her residency application. She asked for three hundred euros, then five hundred euros. Two weeks later she knocked on my door to ask for more. I couldn't understand where all the money was going. ‘Who is this lawyer?' I asked her one day. ‘Would you like me to come along with you to his office? It might help.'

She didn't like that idea at all. She said I didn't understand. It was complex. I told her I didn't have another euro on me. It would have to wait.

That night there was a knock on my door. I welcomed her back into my bed. It was like old times. She was as giving as she had been the first time.

A week later, having parted with another eight hundred euros, I came to my senses. Enough was enough. One night she came downstairs. I met her at the door filled with resolve. Or so I thought. She wore just her maid's shirt, the lavender one, and nothing else. Nothing at all. She pushed me back towards the bed. I told her I had no more money to give, which happened to be partially true.

I needed to be careful. I was spending more than I had budgeted. I had stretched out my stay longer than originally planned. My workmates back home were kind. Kenny Stewart, who had joined Fisheries when I did and who knew all about my ‘domestic situation', had written a thoughtful email telling me to take whatever time I needed. This was back in February. I would be on half pay until June and after that it would be considered leave without pay.

Ines took this news well. She acted as if money was the furthest thing from her mind. She walked me back to the bed and we made love with all the old urgency.

Lamp shades, two more paintings, books, silver goblets Ralf said his father had left him—all of it went. Ines behaved like a wronged woman. I began to make lists of things so I would notice the moment they went missing.

Whenever people ask me what it is like down there I think of the great lonely white continent spilling into the Ross Sea, and the tremendous bulge of the Southern Ocean, its massive swells ballooning by the gunwale, and an overhanging sky that appears as a ragged survivor of some unsighted storm in another region. When I returned from my first trip and spoke about my experiences I also heard news about crewmen with knife wounds helicoptered off fishing vessels. So no surprise that my audiences wondered, their eyes lighting up at the thought of the overheated confinement of the cabin, if there had been violence. I learned to direct my smile into neutral space and that ambiguity seemed to satisfy. The fact is I didn't witness a single blow or see a knife used for any other purpose than to fillet a fish. Once the sea ice broke and we nosed our way through the cracks in the white sheet ice there was no time to think or act or do anything other than haul up toothfish and catch snatches of fitful sleep. There is no night at that time of year, and so the days were impossibly long. My more persistent audiences would nod to get that unpleasant fact out the way. There was no disguising their disappointment when told that no one had been cut or hung over the gunwale by their feet. In the few moments I had to myself, I lay in my bunk mentally composing letters so others might see what I saw. But as soon as I began trying to describe this mystical world I would find myself going on about the toothfish. It had become the easy vessel of all that was strange and new.

At night, on our way south, the only noise was the trawler's steady engine. In heavy swell it pitched and seemed to catch its breath before pushing forward. No sooner did we rise over one watery hill than there was another one to scramble over.

Early one morning I woke to a different rhythm of noise, a quiet idling, and I raced up on deck. An oyster-coloured sea spread all the way to a cloud formation I had never seen before. Everything about that world was new and its stark beauty and intrinsic danger could not be told apart.