The Apartment: A Novel (2 page)

The reception area is empty. It’s just a booth with a buzzer. When you buzz it, you often have to wait five minutes before Mr Pyz or Mrs Pyz comes out smiling. Mr Pyz is a bald man with a large belly and Mrs Pyz is a tall woman with a large, elegant nose. Opposite the reception booth is the door to the restaurant and café, but the main entrance to that is on the street. The walls have wooden skirting and old wallpaper. The burgundy carpet is covered in stains, not because the place is dirty, but because the carpet is – or seems to be – so old. There’s never a crowd of Americans or Canadians or Australians or Irish twenty-somethings wearing backpacks and looking at maps in the reception hall or vomiting in the elevator. And nobody complains about slow service or about noise. This is a hotel for people on their own. In the evenings, the restaurant is busy with locals who come here for traditional food. Mrs Pyz wears a traditional outfit that pushes her breasts out. It gets really loud from about eight to eleven, and then all at once it goes quiet, except on Friday nights, when a blues band comes in. I went to see the band once, and it was hard to stay. I left after three or four songs. It’s hard to watch European men sing the blues. They take it seriously, but the more seriously they take it, the more absurd they become. These guys knew a lot about the blues, they mentioned some good people, but their knowledge was dry. It wasn’t ever going to be anything else. In their sound, there was an emptiness where inheritance ought to be. They manufactured black accents and spoke in broken English, and I felt a little embarrassed for them, so I left. I don’t begrudge them. It was how they chilled out, and how they paid tribute to music they liked. The place was packed. All the tables were full, and some people stood. Mr Pyz asked me what I thought about it the next morning. There was a time in my life when I would have wanted to say it was terrible, but that time has passed. I told him it was a lot of fun. Mr Pyz is a nice man, and he’s proud of his hotel. And Mrs Pyz seems proud of Mr Pyz.

Saskia is ahead of me, and gets to the door first. She turns around and makes a face. The face says, This is going to be painful. She pulls her shoulders together. Saskia can move quickly from being very cool to being very funny. It makes me think she’s not trying to be one or the other. I wish we could preserve our relationship as it is now for a long time. I wish we could remain strangers. She opens the door. The street is white and the sky is a dark grey. We are met by an iciness that is even more intense than I expect, even though it is probably no different from yesterday’s. Saskia digs in her bag for gloves, and I put a winter hat on and pull it down over my ears, as far down as I can get it. I zip my coat and turn the collar up, and stick my hands in my pockets. The underground station, where I buy my newspapers and cigarettes, is to the left. The bus is closer – it’s to the right – but stops often on the way into the centre. Which way, I say, the underground or the bus? It doesn’t matter, she says. Cars go by with lights on, and the lights make the snow shine, and the way the light crawls up the street makes the snow appear to rise rather than fall. Saskia says, Maybe the bus is better. Her teeth are chattering. The shelter is closer, she says. We hurry down the sidewalk, through two trenches of stomped-down slush, created by foot traffic, in a thick layer of snow. Because it’s a bit slippery and I’m trying to keep up with Saskia, I have to take my hands out of my pockets. My fingers start to go numb. My eyes have started to water and the water has started to freeze. I think in my entire life I’ve experienced this kind of cold once before, in Chicago, when I was visiting an old friend. I hated the cold there but I don’t mind it here. It feels like I am walking through my own imagination now, or a dream.

The bus stop is beside the little café where the Italian kid works, but he’s not there today, because it’s Saturday. I’m hungry, but I don’t want to delay us. I don’t want to walk inside and order a piece of bread, and watch the bus go by. The bus arrives every fifteen minutes on a Saturday, and that’s a lot of time in weather like this. A sick feeling rolls through my stomach, which is hunger, so I decide to smoke a cigarette. I pull the box from my coat pocket and show it to Saskia. She says, Okay, but you light it; I’m not taking my gloves off. So I light hers, then my own. I have often wondered when, if at all, I might consider quitting, but now that I am here I have decided there’s no point. It would be different if I had a family, or if I played a sport. But all I do now is walk, and I don’t want to live an especially long time.

From the top of the road, coming slowly, is a blue bus – our bus. The traffic is slow because of the weather. The roads are fine, but the visibility is poor. Saskia smokes the cigarette I have lit for her without hands, just holding it between her lips, breathing in and breathing out. She crosses her arms and looks down the road, at the bus, which is stuck in the traffic it towers over, wipers moving slowly across its windshield, and the whole scene is white and grey and lit up and smoking. I don’t know how long we wait. It is probably a minute, but it feels like ten. Saskia is thinking that we should have taken the underground, and I can see that she wants to say something about this, but also that she doesn’t want to complain. I say, I wonder if the place I get will have a balcony. Do you want a balcony? she asks. I’d like one. That would make our list smaller, she says. It’s not a necessity, I say.

Finally the bus stops in front of us. I take a seat by the window and wipe a streak in the fogged glass so we can see outside, and Saskia sits beside me. And the bus departs, and we watch the street through this small aperture, and we don’t speak. I worry that she may find me too quiet, or boring. I could fill the silence by talking about the past, but I try not to think about the past. For much of my life, I existed in a condition of regret, a regret that was contemporaneous with experience, and which sometimes preceded experience. Whenever I think of my past now I see a great black wave that has risen a thousand storeys high and is suspended above me, as though I am a city by the sea, and I hold the wave in suspension through a perspective that is as constrained as a streak of clear glass in a fogged-up window.

Saskia takes her gloves and hat off. I pull the collar of my coat down and pull my winter hat off. She looks at me and says, I don’t think I’m ever getting off this bus. Saskia has a dark complexion. Her eyes look very tired, and the circles under them are blue sometimes, in certain light. I used to have trouble sleeping. It wasn’t anything in particular, just a fear that I ought to be doing something, that something needed being done, or that something was wrong. I had bad dreams. The dreams were often about showing up to places unprepared, or being asked to do something that I didn’t know how to do. And other times I just lay there, twisting and rearranging pillows, or got up for a glass of water and then stood by the window for a while. But I sleep now. I’ve never slept like I sleep here. I never believed this kind of sleep was possible. I am forty-one years old. I don’t drink as much as I used to. I hardly drink at all here. I like to be awake in the mornings, and thinking clearly. My alarm goes off at seven and I lie in bed for a while. I feel rested. I feel like I’ve been asleep for ten years. I smoke cigarettes and listen to the street. I read a book. The book I’m reading now is something Saskia gave me, an old book of sights to see in the city, with some historical information. The print is tiny and the translation is bad. It says things like, You are pleasing to see the statue. I’m going to learn the language and buy some novels soon. I want to read very long and old ones. They don’t have to be great. I’m going to buy a chair that’s comfortable, and when it’s cold I’m going to set it by the window, and when it’s warm I’m going to pull the chair onto my balcony, if I have one, and read outside in the sunshine, and listen to birds. I am also going to listen to the radio, and I hope my balcony will look over some trees and a street, one where people honk their horns at each other.

When is the last time you slept? I ask her. She doesn’t know. Weeks, she guesses, maybe never. She pauses. I don’t mean never, she says, just that it feels like never. She yawns. You’re making me tired now, she says. Can I see the newspaper? I ask. She hands it to me. It’s damp. I peruse the ads she has circled. I realize my mistake and hand the paper back to her. Saskia could have telephoned these places from my hotel room, or she could call them now, but she doesn’t. It’s the whole experience she wants. We shall sit in a café and have some coffee or tea and she’ll make calls there, then plan our route. I like that we’re not rushing anything, that everything is pointlessly ritualized. The bus is beginning to fill now. Bodies begin to push backward, and a man with a backpack bumps Saskia on the head. She rolls her eyes. That was nice of him, I say. The man turns around and gives me a dirty look, a look that says, Where am I supposed to go? So I give him a look that says, You could at least remove your backpack. Saskia, realizing I’ve become perturbed, says, to me, You must be used to lots of space. The guy mumbles something. I ignore it. I can’t speak the language. I’d look like a fool if I tried to start an argument, and anyway it might be the wrong argument. The man turns back around and Saskia gets hit by the backpack again, so she quickly and quietly unzips its small back pocket. Revenge, she whispers. The reason the bus is getting crowded on a Saturday morning is that everyone is going into the centre to shop, and to visit Christmas markets and drink and have cakes. The economy is bad, but there is only this weekend and the next before Christmas. The streak I wiped in the glass beside me has fogged up again, so I wipe it again. I realize we are moving fast now – we must be in a bus lane. This is a nice time of year, says Saskia, if you don’t mind crowds. I say, Sometimes I like crowds. Good, she says, because it’s going to be crowded. We cross a large suspension bridge, and the sound of the tyres on the road changes considerably. The change nearly creates the sensation of floating. My ears pop. Saskia leans across me to wipe a larger streak in the glass. A long way below is the river, wide and black. The surface of the river is choppy, and snow is falling everywhere, in many directions.

We reach the other side, after a long minute, and the sound of the tyres on the road changes back, and we are in the immediate outskirts of the centre now. The buildings here are all the same. You walk along one street, turn a corner, and you are on the same street. This is what the foreigner tells himself. The longer I stay here, though, the more I notice imperfections in the repetition. I notice a laneway here or there that is small and winding, a shortcut. Or an alley that leads to a street that it seemingly shouldn’t, which tells you that your inner compass has failed. Or you notice a little gateway that leads to a square. Or there’s an old monastery. Or a man who always sweeps the sidewalk outside his shop. You begin to notice that no two buildings are really alike. You begin to see that what you suspected was perfect repetition in an orderly grid is apparent repetition in an imperfect grid, and after a while you learn that what you once considered monolithic is infinitely intricate. And from here you begin to understand the vastness of the place.

The bus stops at a hub for streetcars, trains and buses that come in from the west, across the bridge. Is this us? I ask. Saskia is yawning again. The bus is really warm now. Everyone has been breathing, and creating heat. No, she says, we have a few more stops. The doors open and the bus almost empties. The heat is released with the people who alight. It is sucked immediately into the morning, and what’s left in the bus is cold and refreshing space. Where are we going? I ask. Saskia says, A café with lots of students. It’s … and she pauses, seemingly searching for the correct English word. It’s the first time since I met her that she has paused for a word, and this makes me momentarily wonder at how impressive it is that she speaks English so well. Her accent sounds a bit British. Did you live in England? I asked her once. No, she said. But we study English here for a long time. I studied Spanish in high school and college, I said. Habla español? she asked. Not a word, I answered. She taught herself Latin, so she could read Virgil in the original. She is now reading Dante in Italian, and hopes to learn Japanese next. This is a girl who also spends half her life at parties.

I wipe the window again to see where we are. The closer we get to the centre, the more Christmaslike the city gets. I don’t mind too much about spending Christmas in a hotel. But I would like a little more space. As much as I like Mr and Mrs Pyz, I’d like to have a life where people don’t monitor my movements, even accidentally. I’d like to have my own pots and pans. I’d like a table to place a bowl of fruit on. I have an idea of myself walking around markets where butchers and grocers shout prices over the crowds, and where I’ll carefully and slowly choose vegetables and meat, and come home to cook myself meals. I’d like to have breakfast without having to get dressed. I’d like to wander in and out of rooms and take a bath with the door open. And I don’t want to look out the window of a little room and wonder where, in the city, I’ll end up. The most essential quality of hotel life is the thing I want least: a presumption of departure.

Saskia peers forward and hits the button on the rail. There’s a pleasing ding, and a light illuminates near the driver that says the bus is going to stop. This is us, says Saskia. She puts her hat and gloves back on and stands. The bus pulls over into the grey slop that snow ploughs and traffic have driven toward the kerb and comes to a halt. The door opens. Saskia hops out and I follow. I put my hat on and zip up my coat and put my hands back in my pockets. The unlit Christmas lights stretched above the street are rocking in the wind. They could easily light them – it is dark enough. Are you hungry? I ask. Not really, she says, are you? I am, I say. I think I ought to eat something straight away. Are we far from the café? Ten or fifteen minutes, she says. Okay, I say, then let me just get a quick snack. Right beside us there’s a stand that serves fish fingers and fish sandwiches. These stands are everywhere, and they’re not bad. They load the sandwiches up with mayonnaise and lime juice and fresh coriander, and the bread is always nice. I’d never heard of anything like fish sandwiches from street vendors before I came here, and for that reason I eat them all the time.